Report by John-Peter Gernaat Something that is different in The Christian Community is that we do not begin the preparation for Holy Week and Easter with a period of that is called Lent. We begin the preparation for Holy Week and Easter with a period we call Passiontide. For centuries the preparation for Easter has begun on a day called Ash Wednesday. A period of forty days from Ash Wednesday takes us to the end of Thursday in Holy Week and the Last Supper. These forty days are a representation of a period of preparation. Forty is a significant number; it is the number of weeks of human gestation from conception to birth. The number forty is more important that the unit of time in terms of considering this period as a period of preparation.
We find the number repeatedly in scripture. Noah and his family and a representation of all of creation were in the ark for forty days and forty nights. When the family of Israel left the condition of slavery in Egypt to a new beginning in the ‘Promised Land’ they wandered through the desert for forty years. The current conflict in Gaza has brought to everyone’s attention how very small the area between Egypt and Palestine is in reality, and it would be impossible to wander around in it aimlessly for 40 years, unless this period had less to do with getting to a destination and more to do with the time required for the preparation of arriving in the new land. Elijah journeyed for forty days and forty nights to arrive at the mountain where, at the threshold of a cave – between outer world and the inner world of the cave, he experienced in the ‘slender silence’ the Divine; in the pause that exists between one sound and another, one beat and another. Therefore, in undergoing a period in which something begins for us and needs to grow in us for it to come to birth, this number forty makes sense. Thus, the preparation for Easter was determined to be a period of forty days. To emphasise this very reality for the being of Christ on the earth the first Sunday of Lent has been marked for centuries, including for us, with a reading from the fourth chapter of Matthew: the Temptation. We heard this reading on the second last Sunday of Trinity after Epiphany. After forty days in the desert Jesus bearing the Christ is ready to meet the False Accuser. The week before Holy Week was known in the old tradition, as Passiontide. Our experience in The Christian Community is different. We extend Passiontide to four weeks – a period of a lunar month – and begin Passiontide when other churches are beginning the third week of Lent. The last week of Passiontide for us is Holy Week – the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. We have a different relationship to the period of preparation. It is not a forty day preparation, it is an intense four week preparation that mirrors the four week preparation for Christmas: Advent. It also mirrors the four weeks of Epiphany and of St John's-Tide and of Michaelmas. The experience of a lunar month is a different experience of rhythm and time. It allows us to enter into the preparation for Easter in a modern way, a way that suggests that we have gone through and completed over the centuries our Lenten preparation. We are now ready for a Passiontide preparation expanded to the four weeks before Easter Sunday. When The Christian Community was founded the cycle of the pericopes (the gospel readings from the altar) was set. Some Sunday’s pericopes were set as specified passages while some were indicated as to the content, but the passage left open for the priest to choose. As an example, the reading for the last Sunday of Epiphany is indicated as an appropriate healing to match the contents of the reading of the previous three Sundays, which are passages that are set. There is structure and guidance in the way that the cycle of pericopes is set. Some of the readings echo centuries of tradition. What we are doing in our context is to find a new possibility in our relationship to the Divine out of a form and a structure that has existed for centuries. The structure and the form and pattern are to a large extent maintained. We are looking at what is new in the way in which we approach it. Thus, although we start our preparation for Easter with Passiontide rather than Lent, the pericopes for the two Sundays before Passiontide follow the old tradition of Lent. These are the readings of ‘The Temptation’ and ‘The Transfiguration’. Thus, we prepare for Passiontide in as much as Passiontide is a preparation for Easter. We will follow the old traditions in the pericopes that are set for Passiontide as they continue the Lenten tradition. This will be explored in the next talks and in these talks we will explore what is new for us to understand, that takes us a step further, and is not just a repetition of what has been, but rather a transformation into what can be. In the reading of the last Sunday before Passiontide we hear something of the relationship to fasting from Christ. The disciples ask Jesus why they were unable to cast out the demon from the child who could not hold himself. Jesus points to this kind of healing, being able to move beyond into a new phase of life, one that does not throw one to left and right, into the fire and into the water, but keeps one centred, able to hold one’s self, happening at hand of prayer and fasting. Our understanding of prayer and fasting will be investigated in the next talk. Today, fasting does not necessarily require the abstinence of food and we will investigate what this means and what fasting today can mean. The pericopes for the two Sundays before Passiontide establish a pattern that we must understand. In both the readings there is the possibility of jumping ahead and not fulfilling what must come. What must come is hard, what must come is that the Son of Man, the Son of the Future Human Being – this human being bearing the full expression of Divinity in him (this is what the voice from the radiant cloud says: “This is my Son, in whom I am fully expressed”) – must undergo suffering and death. We express this in the Act of Consecration of Man, that what thinks in us is His Suffering and Death, His Resurrection and His Revelation through all Ages of the Earth to come. The old translation of the Act of Consecration used the word ‘passion’ where we now translate it as ‘suffering’. Passiontide is the time in which we learn how to manage suffering. We cannot escape it. We learn and grow through suffering in life. In the penultimate pericope of Trinity time between Epiphany and Passiontide we hear the False Accuser say to Christ that He should turn the stone to bread. The great power that involves bread is not the turning of stones to bread but rather the turning of bread into the Body of Christ. That is the great change that cannot occur until Easter, through the Mystery of Life and Death and the Mystery of Resurrection. Then the False Accuser tempts Jesus to throw himself off the temple and the angels will bear him up so that his foot does not touch a stone. What is needed is that the body will be lifted onto the cross and the feet nailed to it. Lastly, the False Accuser shows Jesus the glittering kingdoms of the world, but the real Kingdom is the Kingdom within us, and this does not happen without Whitsun. Whitsun does not happen without the Resurrection. Everything depends on the great Mystery of Easter to happen. It is not possible to jump ahead of it so that it does not happen. In ‘The Transfiguration’ Peter sees a spiritual conversation happening between the Law, the Prophets and the Christ – Moses and Elijah and the shining, radiant Jesus bearing the Christ. Peter thinks that this is the conclusion and wishes to establish it through the reference to the Festival of Tabernacles, and now inaugurate a permanent set of tent-canopies. As they come down the mountain Jesus reminds the trio of disciples that the Son of Man, the Son of the Future Human Being, must suffer. Passiontide is about understanding why we must suffer and knowing that we cannot avoid it. These two pericopes prepare us for Passiontide, knowing that we cannot jump ahead no matter the alure of the temptation. We must face the world. Nothing in the world changes except through the human being and the world is in a state of chaos because nothing changes in us. The changes must take place through our actions. Our activity in the world requires a certain suffering to be endured. We grow and learn through suffering. Yet, our task – for the one who follows in the path of Christ – is to relieve suffering for the other. The path of Passiontide is not so much giving up something but rather giving freely of ourselves. We replace fasting with a different form of giving. We have the traditional readings of the Lenten period in the structure of The Christian Community, but at hand of a new way of experiencing the preparation for Easter. This allows us to reflect on what it means for the outer form to remain as it was but for our inner experience to change. The form remains but the content is new. The structure remains but the experience is renewed. There is tension between the two poles of that which is formed and the formless. There is another tension between renewal and repetition. We work with renewal in form, not just repetition in form, nor do we try to find renewal in the formless. The form is needed to renew something. The structure is needed to embody it with new meaning. The tension we carry in this community of Christians is to find renewal in the form. It is not to change the form but rather to change the experience of the substance within the form. This is the tension that we have with our new understanding of the preparation for Easter with Passiontide. We also have the beautiful sequence of readings that have been with us for centuries and we must find new meaning within them. That is the amazing reality of a living scripture. The scripture must be telling us what must be happening for us today. They must speak into the experience of our lives, not just speak about the experience of the disciples at the time of the occurrences in Palestine. When we read the story, we should not be reading a story of what occurred then, but rather the story should help us come to terms with what is happening in our world now. Scripture must address how we must be today. Otherwise, scripture is the past without meaning for the present. It lives when it is available to us in the present in order to prepare us for the future. Passiontide is a preparation for our future.
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FebruaryList of articles
At Christmas 1923, Rudolf Steiner gave a foundation stone verse (a meditation) not to be buried in the earth but rather to be inscribed on the hearts of human beings who wish to follow the insights given to us as human beings from the being of Anthroposophia. In connection to this Christmas Conference of 1923 Rudolf Steiner coins the expression: spiritual forces to refer to the esoteric nature of this Christmas Conference. In July of 1924, he spoke of “those spiritual forces which guide the anthroposophical movement in the spiritual world [which have] now come to meet … a higher benevolence … which flows through the anthroposophical movement.” This movement, too, guided and shaped our founding as a religious renewal movement, as The Christian Community – a true and modern Community of the Christ. The Foundation Stone Meditation will guide our work in the Holy Nights of 2023. We will consider it, the rhythms Steiner recommended to accompany the days of the week, and the unfolding of the future cycles of time (captured in this verse) as described in the New Testament book of the Revelation to John (The Apocalypse). The description above was the introduction to the eight talks and discussions held during the Holy Nights printed in the newsletter. The talks coincided, day for day, with the days of the week in 1923, one hundred years earlier, that Rudolf Steiner presented the Foundation Stone Meditation to the Christmas Conference. We worked, therefore, with a clear sense of significance of the day that we were studying. Rudolf Steiner first shared the Verse on Tuesday 25 December 1923. We began on Tuesday 26 December 2023. The reason was that Rudolf Steiner began on the Wednesday to share a rhythm that could be carried through the week so the Verse could begin to live in the rhythm rather than in an overarching message. The Verse was shared so that we, those who come after who carry a clear sense of Divine purpose for the unfolding of the human being, can place the verse in our hearts. It was not meant as a verse that would be written down and then folded up to be placed in a beautiful dodecahedron into the foundation of a building. A dodecahedron had been placed into the foundations of the first Goetheanum that had burned down a year prior. When the second Goetheanum was build that foundation stone remained within its foundations. The Foundation Stone Verse was given to be a living foundation in the hearts of human beings upon which to build towards the realisation of the Future Human Being that is presented in chapter one of the Book of Revelation. We are to embody the verse. The verse also serves, through the rhythm of the days, to help us re-member ourselves upon waking each morning to guide our days. Remembering Tuesday 25 December 1923 Michaël began with a reading from a lecture given on Christmas Eve that prepared the conference for receiving the verse. When Rudolf Steiner finally gave the verse, he did not give it in its entirety. Here it will be helpful to refer to the copy that is attached as a download as it has been annotated for ease of reference. These annotations indicate four verses and two stanzas to each verse. These annotations are there only to make it easier to refer to a particular order in which the Foundation Stone Verse was spoken out by Rudolf Stiener on the eight days during which it was presented. Thus, when Steiner first spoke the Foundation Stone Verse, he spoke verse 1 stanza 1, verse 2 stanza 1, verse 3 stanza 1, the whole of the verse 4 and then went back and spoke verse 1 both stanzas, verse 2 both stanzas and verse 3 both stanzas. (In the rest of this report a shorthand will be used: V1S1 to refer to verse 1 stanza 1, etc.) One can feel that Rudolf Steiner was building a sense of past, present and future: always being in the unusual space of being in three modes of time. We do not have a way of expressing linguistically in English that we, human beings, are in a space of past, present and future all the time. We carry a clarity of what we know and remember from our past and are always developing what is becoming in our present being. The idea that we are always past, present and future in one is not one that is always easy to grasp or to express in language. In Koine Greek it was more possible to express the three tenses in one, but when we translate scripture into modern languages we become stuck in a tense. A good example is John’s Prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”. In this sentence ‘beginning’ indicates past tense and so we are comfortable with the verb ‘was’, yet the word in Koine Greek suggests that we should translate the verb as ‘was, is and shall be’: “In the beginning was, is and shall be the Word, and the Word was, is and shall be with God”. We can read this also as “In the beginning was the Word; in the beginning is the Word; in the beginning shall be the Word”. This allows us to establish a relationship to each of the tenses and what they move in us. The extract from the lecture by Rudolf Steiner was read to give his description of memory: localised memory, rhythmic memory and temporal memory. (This forms part of GA 260 and is available on the Rudolf Steiner Archive https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA260/English/AP1990/ChrCnf_index.html). In this lecture Rudolf Steiner tells us that monuments were erected by ancient civilisations in a time when they did not have the kind of memory that we have today. The peoples of these early civilisations were taught that wherever they had a particular experience, to set up a memorial. These memorials allowed them to re-experience the event in their head, because the head can call up again everything that has connection with the earth. The principle of olden time was that: we give over to the earth that which we have experienced in our head. This points to an epoch of localised memory. This was a time when everything connected with memory was connected with setting up signs and memorials on the earth. The word memorial embodies the connection of memory at that location. The memory of human beings was outside of the head not within. Memory was carried in memorials and the presence of one of these memorials brought back to the head the original experience. Without the memorial the human being had no memory. The memory was connected with place. We still use this memory for our soul development. An example would be a picture of the Madonna that we hang up so that when we stand in front of it, we can recall memories that we are oblivious of during the rest of the day. We place the picture specifically for the soul work we wish to accomplish in regard to a particular stream of thinking. A second stage of memory development in the human being was achieved in rhythmic memory. This was a memory that was achieved through rhythm; the rhythm allowed the human being to develop a memory of something. The example given was that in order to remember a cow the human being did so through a rhythm such as the sound made by the cow. Thus, “moo-moo-moo” would have invoked the memory of a cow. We can see the development of this memory repeated in the development of children who use repetitive rhythm to remember ideas or concepts. Children will repetitively listen to the same story, and this brings them a sense of comfort because their memory is rhythmic. The ancient art of verse developed from this need to remember which was possible only through rhythms. It was only in the third stage of the evolution of memory development that the human being developed time-based memory or temporal memory. This is the memory that we still have today. We remember what is inserted into our lives in the course of time. This is a far more abstract form of memory than localised or rhythmic memory. The time of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory was historically the time when colonies were planted from the East in Greece. The fear of adults is to lose the events that were placed into course of their lives. This is the condition of dementia. People in a state of dementia will still have a very clear memory of dance or music or verses or prayers which lives in the rhythmic memory. At 10am on Christmas day 25 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke the Foundation Stone Verse. This verse resonates strongly with the ancient concept of ‘know yourself’. The translation of the Verse that you can download from the link, and forms page 2 above, is one that Michaël has worked on for a long time and is currently, for him, the best expression of the original German. This translation may change over time as the understanding of its true essence develops further. Rudolf Steiner spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1. He then continued his lecture: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA260/English/AP1990/19231225a01.html. This lecture is related to the understanding of the three-fold human being and how this bears a relationship to the cosmos and developing an understanding of ‘know yourself’ and how the Verse can be laid as a foundation stone in our hearts. He brought the lecture to the event of Christmas, the day on which this lecture was being given, as memory of the turning point of time when the child was born into whom the spirit being of Christ would enter. He then spoke V4S1, V4S2. He then called upon those gathered to “once more gather before our souls all that follows from a true understanding of the words ‘know yourself in spirit, soul and body’. The Verse gathers all knowledge of the human being from the cosmos and places it in the human heart so that it may speak to us “everything that the universe has to say to this human existence and to this human life and to this human work”. He spoke V1S1, V1S2, V2S1, V2S2, V3S1, V3S2. Concluding: “My dear friends, hear it as it resounds in your own hearts! Then will you found here a true community of human beings for Anthroposophia; and then will you carry the spirit that rules in the shining light of thoughts around the dodecahedral Stone of Love out into the world wherever it should give of its light and of its warmth for the progress of human souls, for the progress of the universe.” In the evening Rudolf Steiner gave another lecture (that is not found in the GA260 on the internet). In this lecture he speaks of realms beyond the earth where in the first realm we may place the First Hierarchy of the Angels: the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones and into the second realm the Second Hierarchy of Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai and into the third realm the Third Hierarchy of Archai, Archangels and Angels. The fourth realm is then the realm of earth where the human being lives. We experience it merely as places of outer objects, but the ancients experienced it as penetrated with the elemental spirits of water, air and of earth. This was Asia. Asia meant the lowest spirit realm in which, as human beings, a person felt that they lived. The ancient human being could only experience the natural world, even to the level of molecules, as being spiritual entities that worked in the natural world. Oxygen was a spiritual stimulus to life in living organisms and nitrogen was a spirit that weaves through the cosmos and works on organic matter is such a way as to prepare it to receive a soul nature. Only initiates in these ancient times could see nature as we see it today, and we now in our process of initiation must carry in ourselves the spiritual-connection picture that we no longer see when we look out into nature. The morning was concluded by each one internalising the Verse of the Foundation Stone of World Love, of World Imagination, of World Thought. Remembering Wednesday 26 December 1923 This talk and the six following this talk are currently being edited and will appear here in the course of February 2024. Below is a summary of the talks as they pertain to the rhythms that Rudolf Steiner gave for the days of the week out of the Foundation Stone Meditation. The Foundation Stone Meditation – the study of the Holy Night of 2023 into 2024 by Rev. Michaël Merle Report by John-Peter Gernaat Rudolf Steiner first shared the Verse on Tuesday 25 December 1923. We began on Tuesday 26 December 2023. The reason was that Rudolf Steiner began on the Wednesday to share a rhythm that could be carried through the week so the Verse could begin to live in the rhythm rather than in an overarching message. The Verse was shared so that we, those who come after who carry a clear sense of Divine purpose for the unfolding of the human being, can place the verse in our hearts. It was not meant as a verse that would be written down and then folded up to be placed in a beautiful dodecahedron into the foundation of a building. Michaël introduced the Christmas Eve lecture in which Rudolf Steiner introduced different types of memory that the human being possesses and how these evolved. From this lecture it becomes clear why he presents with the Foundation Stone Verse seven rhythms that we may incorporate into that part of our memory where rhythmic remembering lives, so that we take the essence of the Verse across the threshold into life between death and a new birth. It is here, in this period of life, that we will recognise the reality of this Verse. When Rudolf Steiner spoke the Foundation Stone Verse he spoke it in various ways. In order to be able to share this without each time writing out what he said you are asked to refer to the Verse as it is presented here (see the loose inserted page). This translation of the Foundation Stone Verse is the translation that Michaël has been working on for a long time. No translation from the German is ever perfect and every translation is an interpretation. This is currently the best translation that Michaël can offer. The presentation of it has been annotated with line numbers and verse and stanza numbers. In describing what Steiner spoke you will find here verse 1, stanza 1, abbreviated as V1S1 for easy reference. On the Tuesday 25 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner first spoke the Foundation Stone Verse. He spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1. He then spoke V4S1 and V4S1. Then he spoke V1S1&S2, V2S1&S2, V3S1&S2. On Wednesday 26 December 1926 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1 and then he presented the first rhythm. The Wednesday rhythm is:
On Thursday 27 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1 and he then presented the Thursday rhythm. The Thursday rhythm is:
On Friday 28 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1 line 1-15, V2 line 1-15, V3 line 1-15, and he then presented the Friday rhythm. The Friday rhythm is:
There are seven rhythms connected with the Foundation Stone Mediation and seven signified that we are in a process of time. This is a relationship to past, to present and future. This means that we need to consider where we work most consciously in the span of our individual lifetime. The reality is that we can best grasp, because we are most conscious, in the period between death and a new birth. Therefore, the period that we are looking at in terms of these rhythms is this period between death and a new birth and becoming conscious now in this time before death of how we can work in preparation through practice for the time after death. In the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday rhythms we encountered the three principal beings who work together in the development of the way of being for the modern human being which is Anthroposophia. These beings are Christ, Sophia (the being of Wisdom) and Michael. We see them at work together with each stepping forward on Wednesday, on Thursday and on Friday with what each brings. With the Wednesday rhythm we encounter the mystery of the human ‘I’ and the Divine ‘I am’. Christ is not mentioned in the Wednesday rhythm but it is the Christ ‘I’ and the relationship of our earthly ‘I’ to the Christ ‘I’ that becomes the bearer of the rhythm on Wednesday. On Thursday we move from rhythm to inner rhythm, and we are with Sophia in the mystery of human inner being, the mystery of the soul. This is the soul rhythm. On Friday we are in the mystery of Cosmic rhythm with Michael and in the heart-rhythm. In the Wednesday rhythm we come into contact with the idea of the Future Human Being, with the Christ Being in Jesus. With the second (Thursday) rhythm (Moon sphere) we come strongly into contact with the Third Hierarchy. The third rhythm (Friday) takes us into the Sun sphere and the Second Hierarchy. In the fourth rhythm we are connecting with the First Hierarchy. On Saturday 29 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1 line 1 – 21 (excluding line 20); V2 line 1 – 21 (excluding line 20); V3 line 1 – 21 (excluding line 20) (Michaël spoke the entire V1, V2 and V3) and then he presented the Saturday Rhythm. The Saturday rhythm is:
The fourth in a cycle of seven is always the turning point. This is the rhythm of the Cosmic Midnight Hour. We are with the Angels, all the Choirs of Angels. We are in the space that Steiner says is about the recreation of the archetypal picture of the Cosmic Human Being. It is the original design, but whenever we reach the Cosmic Midnight Hour, we bring from everything that we have experienced and from everything that we have processed another element of the realisation, of manifestation, of that Cosmic Archetypal Human Being into reality. We bring the experience that enlivens the picture and makes it evermore a reality. Eventually the picture will be a full mirror of what we have become. These rhythms provide a picture of what it means to move through death, the inner planets, the outer planets, the Cosmic Midnight Hour, an insight into the nature of the spiritual cosmos with the fifth rhythm, and insight into the cosmos of soul with the sixth rhythm, and an insight into the nature of the physical cosmos with the seventh rhythm. These last three rhythms are also strongly connected to the three Hierarchies: the spirit, the soul, the body. On Sunday 30 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1 and began to present the Sunday rhythm before reading V4S1&S2 and continuing the presentation of the Sunday rhythm. The Sunday rhythm is: On Monday 31 December 1923 Rudolf Steiner spoke V1S1, V2S1, V3S1, V4S1&S2. He presented the Monday rhythm. The Monday rhythm is:
The fourth rhythm, the rhythm of the Cosmic Midnight Hour brings us to the meaning of the Cosmos and of the fixed stars. It is revealed out of the forces of the Father God. The fifth rhythm takes us through Sun sphere on the descent to earth, and the meaning of the Sun and the planets (the mobile star) are revealed out of the forces of the Son God. The sixth rhythm is the meaning of the Earth and the whole of earth evolution revealed out of the forces of the Spirit God. We see the Earth when we approach it through the Moon sphere. When we have passed through the Sun sphere the human soul is earth-focused. On Tuesday 1 January 1923 Rudolf Steiner presented the Tuesday rhythm. The Tuesday rhythm is:
The seventh and final rhythm is the rhythm connected with the forces of the human being into which Christ incarnates. These are the forces of the beginning of the Fourth Hierarchy. We are the first beings that are created to become the Fourth Hierarchy. The picture of the seventh rhythm is the picture of the future that will be realised on Vulcan, the last embodiment of the earth cycles.
10 February 1913 (GA 265) from Rudolf Steiner: “I am compelled to train myself to be the revealer of the Divine archetypal image in me.” On Tuesday evening Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in which he emphasises the development of a new human culture, a culture that does not come from looking at the world around us, but streams from the Spiritual World through us to establish Human Culture on the earth, rather than to impose earthly culture into the earth. We are already in a turning point of time in the withdrawal of the Mighty Spirits of Form who withdraw so that the Mighty Spirits of Personality can create the seed for the next great Cycle of Time (the Jupiter Cycle). It is now the time of the person who takes responsibility and carries it in their person. We cannot rely any longer on the outer form if it does not come from the inner space. We are in this renewal in the consciousness soul age. The first three Great Cycles – Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon – are the gifting of who we are. In this fourth Great Cycle, Earth, the turning point of time is experienced; something new must arise. The human ‘I’ has been planted as a seed into the human being but it is our responsibility to take hold of this seed in consciousness for the future to arise. This time in evolution is critical to the future of the human being. Heaven has poured itself into the human being and now the human being must take up the work or else nothing moves forward. The resistance we experience in life on earth is there for the initiative to arise in the human being. This is reflected in chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation. What is difficult in life is worth it. by Rev. Reingard Knausenberger This was a theme, explored during two Epiphany Sundays, and the first discovery was, to not only notice what is written in the Bible, but also what is withheld in silence, and not mentioned. For it is worthy of note, that all four Gospels are silent about the time of Jesus’ life after the birth until his baptism in the Jordan. Only one significant spotlight is shone by Luke on the boy as a twelve-year-old, highlighting that as an obviously very important event.
Based on the lectures Rudolf Steiner held during 1913 and 1914 named The fifth Gospel (GA 148), where he shares his research into this question, one can be reminded of the last verse (John 21: 25) of the Gospel of John: ‘Jesus did many other things, but if they were all written down one after the other, I do not think the world itself could contain the books that would have to be written.’ Puberty is a difficult time for every growing child, where one’s whole organisation transforms and inner sensations and experiences present themselves, which can be confusing, chaotic, emotional and causing deep feelings of loneliness and not being understood. From about 18-24 years a sense of wanting to explore the world, find purpose and meaning, acquire skills and interact with different kinds of people arises, also often also a desire to test oneself. Then a third phase until 28/29 years could be felt as a desire to ‘come home to oneself’, searching with whom, to which goals and purpose to commit to. The fifth Gospel takes one on a journey of sensing the unfathomable pain and suffering that Jesus’ soul went through during these years of growing from twelve years into adulthood in his thirtieth year. His experienced realising of the desperate situation of all humankind being on a trajectory of hopeless decline, with no possibility or hope of rejuvenation, or true purpose…finding no one able to understand and to share this depressing reality with…until his mother, who has always ‘carried and nurtured in her heart’ the unusual instances around him, can offer him her heart as a receiving vessel, in the most significant conversation of all time that changed everything and made the baptism possible. What these lectures open up, as one engages wholeheartedly with the content, is more, much more than an intellectual understanding of why Christ was desperately needed ‘to save all humankind’, and how it in fact could happen that the Son of God could make his home in a human body and go through true human experiences, even death, which is not a heavenly, but an earthly event. All this inevitably brought us then to the engaging questions: what about Christ now in our current time, where is his Passion and death, his resurrection continuing, as we endeavour to progress in our evolution to be truly human? What is our task in the present, where is awakening needed? What does it mean: where two or three are gathered, there I will be, how does that happen? What new abilities are needing to be developed now, to be real servants and companions of Christ in the transformation of ourselves and the earth? To name but a few of the new avenues that open up to be explored more in depth. JanuaryList of articles
by John-Peter Gernaat In December the Gospel Study considered John 9 into John 10 with the sixth sign and the third and fourth ‘I am’ statements.
The sixth sign may be related to the Sacrament of Marriage (see in previous reports how the signs have a relationship to the sacraments). The sign is the healing of the man born blind and raises the question as to who sinned that he was born with this condition. The sign considers how to manage relationships. In this sign there is a grace that intervenes and takes matters beyond nature. We bring preconditions into our earthly life at birth. But we must move for these preconditions to move forward. In this the Divine can be made manifest in us. In meeting the Christ-in-me in our lives and working with this power something can develop. We enter life blind to our earthly destiny. Through a relationship with Christ, we can find our destiny and overcome the knots of karma. In our life in the daytime, we can work. When we sleep and are in the world of spirit, we can only reflect on what the day brought. Therefore, it is in the light of day that we find our relationship with the Divine through the relationships of life. The mark that we are aiming to hit is the mark of love and when we miss the mark of love, we refer to this as sin. Our destiny is to transform the cosmos of wisdom into a cosmos of love. The ‘I am’ statements of Christ are expressions of the Human Being, with the indwelling Christ, who can represent the Divine. “I am the door” is an understanding that the astral body is connected with the soul constitution. The soul lives in the astral body. It is in the soul that the door can exist. The door is the threshold from here to there. Across this threshold the sense impressions of the material world meet the intuition of the spirit. “I am the good shepherd” is a reflection of the constitution of the ‘I’. The good shepherd has the ability to manage the soul constitution consisting of the sentient soul, the mind (or social) soul and the consciousness soul. We, as humans, are the shepherds. We are not the sheep. We must take leadership of ourselves. This passage (John 10) is closely connected with the constellation of Aries which was understood by ancient civilisations as the constellation of the Hired Man. It represented the additional labour needed at the time of lambing and of harvest. But it was realised that the hireling does not care for the sheep in the way that the shepherd does, and the imagination of Aries changed in the ancient Sumerian world to the constellation of the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep throughout the year. It then became understood as the constellation of the ram, and we know the connotation of the ram from the story of Abraham and Isaac. The ram caught in the bush is sacrificed in the place of Isaac. The constellation of the ram now becomes for us the constellation of the lamb. The lamb becomes associated with the Passover when it is the blood of the lamb that is smeared on the door jamb. In the Book of Revelation the lamb has become the newly-born lamb. The words that Christ spoke were connected to the mighty constellations of the zodiac for those who heard him. Christ was connecting himself to mighty spiritual images and for this, some thought he was mad. But Christ created a new relation to the constellations. What he was saying was understood as there being a god among the people. Only Jesus with the Christ in him could make this claim that the Divine now lives in the human being. The I-organisation is a gift from Christ that each one of us can now take hold of through the Christ-in-me. Each one of us can now open and close the door through the indwelling Good Shepherd. If we are not the Good Shepherd, we become the Hired Man who flees when things turn bad. It is only the Doorkeeper who can truly and freely open and close the door. Christ came on earth for all humanity and once we listen, we can become one humanity with one Shepherd, the Christ-in-me. Religious practices only matter if they lead to us our true humanity. by John-Peter Gernaat A question was asked in the Spiritual Well-being discussion group as to what we can do to work towards becoming the ideal of the future Human Being. For this Michaël brought again the exercises that Rudolf Steiner gave and are often referred to as the six subsidiary exercises. To read more review this report.
Michaël also introduced the Rosicrucian meditation based in the stages that Christ follows in the Gospel of John on the way to the Resurrection. By following these stages we can undergo a true Christian initiation in being under way with Christ. These stages are:
We can become aware of how much of our action is reactive and goes back to what we learned from our parents. ‘When I can take hold of myself in balance, I am not pushed from side to side by circumstances around me.’ Introduction the Book of Revelation and the Letters to the Communities by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat The aim of these talks in advent is to embrace a picture from the Book of Revelation that is relevant to the preparation for Christmas. In the talk given a few weeks ago introducing the Book of Revelation Michaël spoke about how unusual it is that this book made it into the Canon of scripture at all. The imagery that is presented is not immediately obvious. The rest of the New Testament seems to make up a comprehensive whole to which the Book of Revelation has been added as an additional attachment. Yet the Book of Revelation presents a comprehensive picture that allows everything else to find its context in the big unfolding of all of the activity of the Divine. What is the activity of the Divine? We hear in the Act of Consecration of Man that God, with Christ, creates, heals, and ensouls. This is another way of saying ‘creation, salvation, and sanctification’. This is an understanding that Christians have had for centuries that the activity of the Divine is the act of creation, the act of making whole (healing), and the act of making holy. We experienced the entire span of this activity in the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is written very consciously and precisely by its author, John, and he writes as an initiate, someone who has been initiated and is writing about a new process of initiation. It is important to understand that John is not just an individual but is a community within an individual. Living within John, the writer of the Book of Revelation, is the initiate experience of John the Baptist. Rudolf Steiner tells us that the initiate capacity of soul that grew within John the Baptist poured into John the gospel writer, John the writer of the Book of Revelation. John, the gospel writer, himself has gone through an initiation. Rudolf Steiner reminds us that this is not the young John who was the disciple of Jesus, part of the Twelve, but Lazarus who has undergone, one can say, the last of the real temple sleeps, three days in the tomb, and has come out having gone through this initiation. Living within this community of John Lazarus is the enthusiasm of spirit of the young John, the disciple. This community of John (the last of the great prophets, the last of the great initiates and one initiated as an apostle) goes through a new initiation. These are stages of initiation that John goes through in this experience. He writes not dreaming about the heavenly world but actually being in the heavenly world. He is given the opportunity to experience the heavenly world and then to return to write about it before finally crossing that threshold in death in his old age. The Book begins very clearly: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must take place”. This is the full revelation of where Christ is in the great activity of Divinity, the great activity of God. In the second verse we get a very important statement that reveals three things: “Who bore witness to the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ even to all that he saw.” So, John is an eyewitness to three things: the word, which is Christ who comes from God. This is a consistent theme of the New Testament: “I have been sent by the Father”. This means that Christ is fulfilling something beyond himself, there is a purpose with the one who sends, that Christ fulfils. Christ came to earth on a greater mission not just his own mission. John is an eyewitness to the word, which is Christ who has been sent by God, he is an eyewitness to the sacrifice of Christ, and he is an eyewitness to everything that he sees in the heavens. Then John tells us three things: “Blessed is he who reads aloud the word of the prophecy and blessed are all those who hear and keep what is written therein for the time is near”. So, happy is the one who reads and ponders; happy is he who reads aloud (with others); and happy those who have the ears (of the soul) to hear it. Then in verse four we read: “John to the seven churches that are in Asia” (Asia Minor). These were communities of Christians that had established themselves and they became the archetype of communities. They are more than just the community that was living there, they become representative, through the qualities that lived in those communities. As soon as we are dealing with seven, we are dealing with an unfolding of time. This is a big theme in the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is written in three tenses: past, present, and future. It applies to what has been, to what is now, and to what is to come. In verse four it says: “John to the seven churches that are in Asia: grace to you from Him who is, who was, and who is to come.” The establishment of three phases of time is clear. “And from the seven spirits who are before his throne, Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.” John is sending the message from a three-foldness: from the everlasting God, from the seven spirits at the throne of God and from Jesus Christ the true and faithful witness. Who are the seven spirits who are before the throne of God? These seven spirits can mean more than one thing. They are, in the way that they are described later, as the seven spirit breaths, most appropriately the Seraphim, the beings of love. These are the seven spirits that are always at the throne of God. There is a seven-foldness about the Seraphim, and this is interesting as they, together with the other angels of the first hierarchy, were created before time. They have a relationship to the unfolding of time, yet they were before time and now they manifest, one can say, in time, for us. There is also the possibility of seeing these seven spirits before the throne of God as the seven creative spirits of our time. In this picture too, we can see time past, the time now – in which case they would be the seven spirits of the Elohim – those creative spirits that created the world as we experience it now, and the seven spirits around the throne of God is also a reference to the seven spirits of the future, to which we are aligned: the seven manifested aspects of the human being when we become filled with the seven great gifts of the Holy Spirit. So, this is also a picture of us, the Future Human Being, at the throne of God, manifesting the great gifts of knowledge, wisdom, etc. These seven gifts are mentioned in the Prophet Isaiah. The picture is what was, what is and what is to come. This carries through the Book of Revelation. In the first chapter of the Book of Revelation we have the incredible picture of the Son of Man – Son of The Human Being, the child that is the future human being to which we give birth in the future. Our future becoming realises the ideal of the human being that we see in Jesus Christ as the Son of Man. The resurrected Jesus Christ is for us a picture of the future human being. The picture of the Son of Man stands with seven golden stands that bear light and seven stars. John is told to write what is and what is to be hereafter. The mystery of the seven stars and the seven lampstands: the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the lampstands are the churches themselves, the seven archetypes of community. John now has to write a letter to the angel of each church community. The letter from the Son of Man to the angel that cares for that community. This is the concept of having epistles in the Act of Consecration: the opening and closing prayer that is read from the right of the altar – the only activity that should take place from the right of the altar is the reading of the epistles, because it is from that place that we can speak to the spiritual world and can hear from the spiritual world; it is the place of being grounded on the earth. We are lifted to the heights of heaven with the Word which is read from the left of the altar. Everything else is central to the altar as it has to do with the activity of Christ, in and through us. The epistle is a two-way communication: it is our letter to the angel, and we receive the same letter from the angel. It is what we acknowledge and also what is revealed to us. Each letter brings something that explains what was, what is and what is to come. Whenever we are in seven, we are in a cycle of time. We see in these seven letters the unfolding of consciousness in human activity as described by Rudolf Seiner in the post-Atlantean cultural epochs. It is the developing of a kind of consciousness that records something of itself. The seven cultural epochs are referred to by name, but belong to the whole earth, even though they may be pinpointed to a location as the source from which they spread to become a global reality. They are referred to as the Ancient Indian, the Ancient Persian (more accurately the Ancient Mesopotamian), Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Roman, our period (the fifth), to be followed with the essential soul qualities that exist in seed form in the way that some Russians have spoken and written, and finally an American epoch, the seed form of which is still difficult to discern today. The seven letters to the seven angels describe what unfolds from each of these cultural epochs, but we can also see in these letters a much greater, ancient spanning of time from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon: the span of time as we as human beings move ever closer to an incarnation on earth. We can also see in these letters a much wider scope, also a planetary scope, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars/Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We can see in these letters the way in which things develop in any and every cycle of time, be it our cultural cycles of time, the wider span of all of creation or the descent of the human being through the planetary spheres onto the earth. It is the process of breathing, warming, digesting, secreting, maintaining, growing, reproducing. It is the inner experience of uprightness, thought, speech, blood, glands, respiration and reproduction. All the seven-folds are included in this. We see it in the Act of Consecration of Man as the lighting up of the archetypal community stages, when the candles are lit at the very beginning. We light up all the stages of development: that have been, those that are and those that are still to be. We relate to the seven stages – to the seven letters – they tell us that we undergo a rhythm. No matter the metrication of the world, time cannot be metricised: 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 7 days of the week, and 12 months of the year. The seven days of the week are an opportunity to feel the cycle and rhythm of the span of time. We should proceed through the week in a developmental stage that lifts us from one Sunday to the next, not proceed as from the rest of Sunday to the exhaustion of Saturday. This is the difference of working with time only from the material world around us as opposed to the conscious rhythm of an inner spiritual place. Therefore, think of the seven letters as the lighting up that takes us into a rhythm and cycle. We will see the unfolding of our future becoming as we continue through the Book of Revelation in the next three Sundays, our becoming as beings of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. The Book of Revelation is connected to becoming, it is truly connected to Advent where we hear the Divine Might of Worlds say: “Become.” Deepening our understanding of the Book of Revelation - The 7 Seals - Imagination by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat Every image and everything that unfolds in the Book of Revelation can be viewed in a threefold way, as speaking about what has been, what is currently happening and what will be. All three elements of time are present in every picture. The idea of image and imagination can be experienced in The Act of Consecration of Man, The Act of the Consecration of The Human Being. We speak of imagination as something that has to do with the development of thinking. It is not a fantasy but the development of a clear, spiritually endowed, picture thinking. It is the capacity to hold the picture in its full reality; to understand it and to work with it. We experience in The Act of the Consecration of The Human Being the seven golden stands bearing light on the altar; a priest dressed as a picture of the Son of the Future Human Being with vestments representing that which is to develop in the human being; the opening epistle as the letter to the angel of the congregation. The Act of Consecration of The Human Being can be divided into two parts: Gospel and Eucharist, stemming from the Ancient Hebrew practice of Word and the practice of Sacramental Sacrifice. The Eucharist has three parts: Offering, Transubstantiation and Communion. In the Offertory is established the Imagination we need; the transubstantiation is the Inspiration or the words that can change things; and the feeling at one with, or Intuition, that is the idea of Communion. The idea of Imagination is strong in our Offertory. It is in the Offertory that we hear that “our thinking should live in the life of the Holy Spirit through all ages of the earth to come”. The preparation looks at how we think about ourselves, about our relationship to the Divine. We recognise our failings and our weaknesses. We recognise that we can bring all of our best thoughts and intentions before God while also recognising that we are the ones who stray from him. We deny His being by not living up to our full potential. We recognise that all who are born into this life are called to this fullness of humanity, which involves a new type of thinking; and all who have died have to hold to the thought that their eternal being is what their whole creative span is about and not lose sight of that by investing only in their temporal being. There are images that are used universally, that when they are used speak to a fundamental sense of ourselves as human beings. An example is the image of a tree. The tree symbolises something of growth and development, of a capacity to leaf, flower, fruit, and bear seed for the future. We identify strongly with trees in so far that we call ourselves a tree: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Another symbol that is strongly held, particularly in the parts of the world that have carried the myths and stories of our whole world human culture, is the symbol of the horse. The horse is used in many myths as the symbol for our capacity to think. The horse becomes a symbol for carrying our thoughts forward, carrying our thoughts swiftly into action, to be one with our thinking. There is also the mythological winged horse that symbolises that our thoughts can fly. An image is presented of a book with seven seals. The seals close the book, and each seal must be broken before the book can be opened. The image that one could imagine is that of a scroll on which the book is written that is rolled up and bound in a cloth and the cloth is sealed with seven wax seals that hold the scroll in place. As each seal is broken, one can imagine, that something is revealed until all seven seals have been broken. This image appears in chapter five with the question: “Who can open the seals?” No one is worthy or capable of breaking the seals and thereby revealing the continuation of the story. John says that he wept much that no one was found to open the book or to look into it. Then one of the Elders – when John speaks of the Elders he is speaking of a Spiritual Hierarchy, the Thrones – says to him: “Weep not, for lo the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the rod of David, has conquered so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” The Lion of Judah is associated with the idea of the Messiah coming from the House of David with the strength (capacity, courage) of a lion. “And between the Throne and Four Living Creatures and among the Elders I saw a lamb standing.” The Lion of Judah appears as a Lamb. It is standing as though slain. It means that the Lamb has already been sacrificed, but the sacrifice has not ended it, the sacrifice has rather enlivened it into another stage. John describes the Lamb as standing as though slain with seven horns and seven eyes. The seven horns indicate that it has the capacity to draw in everything that can be drawn in from the cosmos. The horn symbolises a connection to the Spiritual World, drawing in and raying out. The seven eyes represent a clarity of vision. John describes the seven horns and seven eyes as the seven spirits of God sent out over all the earth. Here is a connection not only with the sevenfold Seraphim but also with the sevenfold Elohim; the form that goes out across the whole earth, that can really see what needs to happen. We realise that only Christ can open the seven seals. Then we go into the opening of the seals. When the first four seals are opened horses appear. However, the seals must be opened before the horses can appear. The first horse that appears when the first seal is broken is a white horse and the rider wears a crown and carries a bow in his hand. The white horse represents pure, spiritual thinking and the rider has the capacity to wear the crown. The bow symbolises that the rider rides out with an intention towards which he can aim. He rides out conquering. This is a clear image of spiritual thought. When the second seal is opened a red horse appears and the rider is given permission to take peace from the earth so that the peoples of the earth will fight each other, and he is given a great sword. One must note that the rider is given the sword after the fighting has broken out, it is not the sword that causes the fighting. The sword is the same image symbol as the double-edged sword that comes from the mouth of the Son of Man; it is the word that can reconcile. The red horse is the individual thinking that is the reality of the human being. As soon as there is individual thinking there is conflict in thinking. It is the experience of egoism that leads to confrontation and conflict. The red colour reflects the blood of the human being that carried iron which gives us the capacity to stand for who we are. There is no growth for the human being without becoming individual. We find our common humanity out of our individualised humanity. When the third seal is broken a black horse appears and the rider has a balance in his hand, not the balanced scales carried by Michael, this is the balance for measuring the world. The descriptions given are about commercial goods and money. The balance scale is there to find that balance of one thing to another and knowing the cost of everything. The horse is black because it has to do with the thinking of materialism. Without this kind of thinking we do not come to understand ourselves. However, this thinking can lead from the spiritual thinking to individual thinking to material thinking to the fourth horse. When the fourth seal is broken a pale horse rides forth. It is dying and in a process of disintegration. The rider’s name is ‘Death’, and Hades (the world of the dead) follows the rider. This rider is given the power to kill with the sword. This symbolises the kind of thinking that can lead to death. But this is not the end of the seals. We have seen the journey from the spiritual heights of thinking before earthly incarnation through our discovering our sense of self in earth incarnation in a physical way right up to the point of death. That is not the end of the picture. The fifth seal reveals all those who have died and are seeking the protection of the altar. Those who have passed through death seek the altar and gather in the sheltering shadow of the altar. We have taken the journey of thinking that has brought us to a different space. When the sixth seal is broken there are earthquakes and the sun turns blood red and the moon falls from the sky. It is an image that is similar to the image we read in Luke chapter 21. Even after enduring death and finding the shelter of the altar we face a time that feels chaotic. It feels as though the sky is rolled up and every mountain and every island is removed from its place. Mountains are places that we climb to feel connected to the Divine. An island is a place where we feel isolated and alone. Both the ability to ascend spiritually to the heights and our sense of isolation are removed from their place. These polar opposites are removed and we find ourselves, possibly, in a new space. In the midst of this chaotic experience, just as in Luke 21, we read that a new capacity is born. It is in the turmoil that something new can come for the human being – we do not develop without resistance. Then we hear about the 144 000, which is a symbolic number that represents the full picture by the full picture (twelve by twelve) and the fullness of dimension (ten by ten by ten). It is a dimensional capacity that is a number so great that no one can count it. Following this is a picture of the human being: “And all the angels stood in a circle about the Throne and the Eldars and the Four Living Beasts, and they fell on their faces before Throne and worshipped the Divine Ground of the World and said: ‘Amen’ which is ‘Yes, so be it’ (‘Yes, so it shall be’, and ‘Yes, so it has been’ are all good translations of the word ‘amen’, again spanning the three dimensions of time). This is the word that can now be spoken which is the seven-fold character of the human being: blessing, revelation, wisdom, thanks-offering, dignity of soul, strength of worlds, and the power of the spirit before our God in all ages, amen.” More traditional translations of these words are: blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honour, power and might. These words describe the human being from the spiritual heights to the physical reality. Working upwards: might – the strength of the physical body; the power of the etheric life-force; the honour of a well-balanced astral body; the thanks-offering capacity of an I-organisation – the capacity to offer and to give (eucharist); the wisdom of spirit-self; the glory of life-spirit; and the blessing of spirit-human. The word ‘blessing’ is eulogy. In koine Greek is means to speak the blessing of consecration upon a human life. We become a eulogy – our very being speaks to the world that we are consecrated. That is what the Act of the Consecration of The Human Being is about: we come so that the future human being is consecrated. This full, beautiful picture of the human being emerges so that the seventh seal can be opened. It is only when the human being is fully present that this last seal can be opened and now we have the openness of true imagination. What happens when the seventh seal is broken? Silence for half a span of time (half an hour). This is our capacity, in silence, to hold the image, to carry the picture in us. The outer chaos is over. The picture exists in us, and we hold it for half a span of time before the seven trumpets sound. Life exists with a moment of stillness in between; between each beat of the heart. Half of our lives is active when the sun is in the sky and half of our lives is at rest, in spiritual reflection – the essential self at one again with the spirit – when the sun is below the horizon. During sleep we gain the insights needed to navigate the waking half of our day. This is the half cycle of time. In the Act of Consecration of Man there is something between the Offertory and the Transubstantiation, there is a silence during which the altar is incensed. The altar appears because it has been completely demarcated and blessed in its length, its width and its height. The Seals open up inspiration and thinking. The White Horse with its rider crowned and with the bow, the Red Horse with its rider given the sword as a way of harmonising the conflict, the Black Horse with the rider with the scales, the Pale Horse with a rider that is Death and Hades following, and then the fifth seal with all those who have died in Christ in the shadow of the altar, and the sixth seal with a great turmoil and chaos of life where the fullness of the human being is beautifully expressed, and then to rest in silence which comes with the seventh seal where we hold the image. There is nothing more to add. Deepening our understanding of the Book of Revelation - The 7 Trumpets - Intuition by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat If we look at the liturgy of the Christian Church we inherited two aspects from the ritual practices of Judaism. One is the ‘Word’, turning to scripture, and the other is the ‘Ritual of Sacrifice’, which for the Christians came in the commemoration – the re-membering and the re-living – of, what we refer to as the Last Supper, which is linked to the Sacrifice on the Cross (the Mystery of Golgotha). The ritual of sacrifice in the Christian liturgy is made up of three parts: the Offering, the Canon or the Transubstantiation, and Communion. The ritual of sacrifice is also referred to as the Eucharist. In the Act of Consecration of the Human Being one can see the three parts of the Eucharist linked with the Seven Seals, the Seven Trumpets and the Seven Bowls of God’s Passion, not because there is a direct reference to Seals, Trumpets or Bowls, but because the Seals open up for us a picture of the human being descending onto the earth, living here in the reality of earth existence, and having to reconnect with the Spirit and the Offering ends in silence – the silent censing of the altar. What happens in the Book of Revelation is that after the Seven Seals have presented a picture of how things unfold and the silence, the Trumpets sound. There is big difference between pictures and sound. The Creation Myth (it is written as a myth in its style) has Divine speech creating the world; the Elohim speak: “Let there be …” and so it is. Only the human being has to learn a language to communicate. Through language we give meaning to our inner life, unlike animals who can express, through sounds, their feeling life. The Trumpet sounds move us from Imagination to Inspiration. We use this word, inspiration, in our common language, but we do not recognise that this word has something to do with our future development. The Seven Seals have something to do with us and the change in our astral constitution into what we call Spirit Self, becoming fully dignified in our likes and dislikes, coming to a sense of ourselves so that the persona that we all create and our essential self actually become one. The persona will become an expression of our essential self and no longer a mask. When we consider the development of Life Spirit we are moving into Inspiration. This is where there is power in the words that we speak. Our speech becomes divine in that it becomes creative. This means that there is a transformation or transubstantiation of our life forces, our formative forces, our etheric body. This becomes the capacity to inspire through what we say, and to hear the inspiration of the Spiritual World. The Trumpet blasts shift something. Consider again the Rider on the Red Horse that appears with the opening of the second Seal. He is given the two-edged sword of the Word. Words form and cut, and delineate and distinguish. When we take the time to compose our words, they carry weight and can create something in the mind of the listener or reader. This brings us to the expression: the pen is mightier than the sword. With the first Trumpet blast a third of the earth is burned up, with the second a third of the sea is turned to blood, with the third a third of all springs and streams of water dry up, with the fourth a third of the lights in heaven – sun, moon and stars – are darkened. We are losing a third. This means that something has been transubstantiated. Something new arrives, but for this to arrive we lose something. As the power of Christ in the I-organisation of the human being is able to transubstantiate the etheric body, to bring a renewal of its existence into Life Spirit the connection to the physical disappears, is loosened and we lose a third of ourselves. We lose our connection to the physical as we become spiritualised. We become beings of soul and spirit whilst being earthly beings. Our dependence and the unhealthy attachment we have to the material physical body is transformed. This is the power of the middle part of our Eucharist when we consider the picture language that is present in the Offering. Consider the power of the Word (filled with the power of Christ) so that there is transubstantiation. This transubstantiation does not happen at hand of silent prayer, it happens at hand of spoken word. This is the power of Inspiration and the power of the Trumpet blasts. Before we can consider the Bowls of God’s Passion we must have a new picture. The new picture is that which we offer. What are we offering and how are we offering ourselves; what new picture do we have of ourselves in this offering, and then what changes? The Transubstantiation in The Act of Consecration of The Human Being is not only the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, it is the power of transubstantiation for that which must change in us; the change of the very substance of us into that which it must become. This is the power at hand of word; it does not happen in silence, it is creative. The images that are presented with the Trumpet blasts contain a sense of woe. We are losing something. However, the question is what are we gaining? We lose bread and wine at the altar; when one takes Communion it is the Body and the Blood of Christ. We lose something in order to gain what it has become. We may lose our connection to the material physical, but this is so that we may gain our connection to the last stage of spiritual development, Spirit Human, which is the fully transformed physical form into what we are to become. These are the great mysteries that appear to us in The Act of Consecration of The Human Being, and they are in the Book of Revelation. This explains the importance of this book which contains so much. But we need the eyes and ears well attuned to be able to read it for what it is saying, otherwise it is easy to misunderstand this book as a fantasy. It is about the development and the transubstantiation of the human being and of the earth. It is about our future becoming. Our future comes at hand of challenges and being able to see when things are changing and being renewed in the becoming that we are aiming to achieve. The real change happens at hand of word, not silence. Consider that in Advent we hear about the “eternal Divine, wielding Word”, the extraordinary power that we also hear in Luke 21: “My Logos, my Word-Power, will remain and carry”. This is the power of Christ. These Trumpet blasts are drawing us directly into the power of the Word, not only to recreate but also to renew; to bring about the new creation and renew our forming capacities into something that is alive and able to bring about the change that we are looking for. There are many ways to interpret the picture that comes with the Trumpet blasts; one that is preferred for these talks is the picture of the future human being. That is the theme that we have been following. There are elements in the future human being that are Christ-like, there are elements that are Michaelic. If we read carefully, it is a picture of the future human being that we read in chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation. We have seen the picture of the future human being – the Son of Man – who is immediately recognised as the Christ, Jesus transformed by the Christ. This is the picture of the future human being, the Son of Man, with the seven golden stands bearing light and the seven stars. We read this picture in the opening chapter. In chapter 10 we read: “And I saw another Angel of great strength descended from Heaven, clothed in a cloud. About his head the rainbow shone. His face was like the sun and his feet were like pillars of fire. In his hand he held a small open book. He placed his right foot on the sea and his left on firm ground. And he called out with a great voice which is like the roar of a lion. The Seven Thunders answered his call with their voices, and when the Seven Thunders spoke I wanted to write down their words. Then I heard a voice from heaven which said: “Do not write it down, take hold of it in yourself”. The normal translation is “seal it up”, but, to place a seal on something is to take ownership of that on which you place your seal. The instruction is to not keep a record of what is heard, but to become it. That is the power of word. That is the power of the voice of the Seven Thunders. This is where we are with Inspiration. It means that we have a responsibility as human beings. How much of what we say inspires other towards their growth and development, and how much of what we say diminishes? Words carry great power. Through words that instil doubt and fear we can create a picture of ourselves that is false. The words of The Act of Consecration of The Human Being are very important, because they build a true picture, and they sound a true change. In The Act of Consecration of The Human Being we are presented with a living experience that becomes a new living image in our imagination. We see at the altar a journey in living real time, that is more complete than any images we may review on paper. We can learn to read The Act of Consecration to know what is unfolding. Even without a full reading of The Act of Consecration it is possible to have a sense for what is unfolding. Deepening our understanding of the Book of Revelation - The 7 Bowls of God's Passion - Intuition and the Heavenly City by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat This is the last part of what is being revealed to John in the heavenly experience that he records in the Book of Revelation. The veil has been lifted and John sees the great events unfold. Thus far we have looked at the Seven Seals as a picture of the opening up of the future capacity for Imagination in the human being and how that relates to the Offertory in The Act of Consecration of The Human Being, out of the picture that comes to us from this part of the sacrament. We have looked at the quality of transformation and transubstantiation at hand of sound, of the power of word, what happens when there is vibration. If we consider the Trumpet blasts of the angels as the voice of the angel rather than the musical sound of the Trumpet, so that the Trumpet is an extension of the voice of the angel, in the resounding and re-sounding there is a creation that happens. We considered this at hand of our future capacity for Inspiration and in terms of the Canon of The Act of Consecration of The Human Being, the Transubstantiation. In this talk we will look at the Seven Bowls of God’s Mighty Will, of God’s Passion, at hand of Communion and our future capacity for Intuition.
The translation of chapter 15 of the Book of Revelation is often poorly rendered as the Bowls of God’s Wrath and the angels pour what appear to be plagues over the earth. These are not plagues but trials, they present a challenge for our growth and development. They present something that the human being must overcome. These trials are not intended to destroy, they are intended to purify, to bring about a healing. We come to understand that illness comes to us so that we can face it and through it come to something, even if the illness results in death, as the person can come into a new relationship to themselves in crossing the threshold through the illness. Trials and illnesses are all about our ability to take responsibility in the situation. Read, at this point, John Madsen’s translation of Emil Bock’s translation of chapter 15 of the Book of Revelation (or the translation you have at hand). It introduces the Seven Bowls at hand of the Song of Moses, and one understands that the Seven Bowls of God’s Will are loving. Those who are sent the trials are sent them in order to overcome, in order to thrive. “And a new great and amazing sign was revealed in heaven to my sight: seven angels with the seven last trials with are the fulfilment of God’s mighty will.” The fulfilment of God’s will for our development is that after a new capacity for Imagination and Inspiration we can work with Intuition: discerning clearly how to work with that which approaches. We then read that those who have overcome have the harps of God; they have joined the orchestra of God as a part of the orchestral working of Creation. The song that they sing is the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb. That which Moses prefigured closely matches that which is fulfilled by the Lamb. We have to go through the sea and get to the other side and then go through the period of forty, which is the period of gestation and the number of initiation, during which we wander, and after the journey we are born into a new relationship into the Promised Land, into where we are to be. One can sense through this song that something is revealed that was not fully revealed before. God is revealing something to Himself. This revelation happens through our becoming. The angels who appear are beings of light that we can understand through the white of their garments. They are girded which means that are held in their task. The smoke of incense is connected with the rising, quickening of soul life activity. In reading the pouring out of the third trial there is a response from the Altar: “… your judgement leads to the Truth and to the Good”, and one realises that these trials are not a punishment but a loving gesture that creates awareness so that something can shift. Once we have been purified through these experiences that strengthen us for the Good and for the True it is time to make the seed, to ensure that there is an evolving, continuing stream. The seed is the New Jerusalem. It is the amazing square-shaped, cube seed. It is a platonic solid with the height and the length and the breadth all the same. The power of the cube is quite something. The numbers of the measurement of this cube are very significant and will be discussed in the future study of the Book of Revelation in the Gospel Study. We do not often think of the New Jerusalem as being linked to the seven Bowls but in chapter 21 we hear: “Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven Bowls with the seven last trials, and he said to me: ‘Come! I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb’”. The invitation to see the seed comes when the human being has the Intuition to see it. “And he led me up to the Spirit, to a great and lofty mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem descending out of the Heaven, out of the realm of the Godhead. It shone in the light of the revelation of God. Its radiance was like that of most precious stone, it was like a crystal-clear jasper.” Jasper is a silicate that with impurities has a variety of colour. In the ancient world 'iaspis' was heliotrope or blood-stone: green silicate with red blood inclusions. The combination of red and green is used in the Advent Wreath and as the seasonal colours of Easter. This colour combination has a very specific reality. The ancient world had a sense that this stone had these colours because of something within the stone. Today we know that it is iron oxide that provides the red colour while the green colour is provided by inclusions of other minerals. Therefore, if the iron oxide and inclusion of minerals are removed the jasper will be clear, it will be a clear silicate-like glass. Then follows the description of the City with its high wall and twelve gates and then: “he who spoke to me, one of the seven angels (the last angel with the last of the Bowls of the passionate will of the Divine) had a golden measuring rod to measure the City” and its gates and its walls. The angel measures the entire City and “this is the measure of the human being and equally that of an angel”. In this we realise what our future is all about: we develop our Imagination, our Inspiration and our Intuition – this is what is revealed to us in The Act of Consecration of The Human Being, so that we can be consecrated as the future human being; the human being that has become the angel. The Act of Consecration blesses our unfolding. The Act of Consecration of The Human Being is in so many ways a manifestation of the reality we find depicted and described in the Book of Revelation. Here it is for us to deeply muse upon and divine the Spirit. Stonehenge, Tintagel, Glastonbury - Spiritual stream of Celtic origin in the light of Christianity3/1/2024 Stonehenge, Tintagel, Glastonbury - Spiritual stream of Celtic origin in the light of Christianity Cultural Evening presentation by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat This presentation is about a culture that understood itself in connection to the spiritual world and a great cosmic reality and not as the expression of a culture that saw itself as human and limited to the earthly plane. The monuments of which images were shown in the presentation are made by human hands who understood themselves as part of a cosmic unfolding. The three sites that Michaël visited in October 2023 can be linked by a Celtic stream. This is a Celtic stream that had a prefiguring of Christianity. Stonehenge is a site that has been linked to the religious activities of druids. However, it was not built by druids. Stonehenge predates this Celtic stream and if the druids used Stonehenge for the purposes for which its builders intended, they would have inherited the knowledge. The interest in this presentation is to consider how this Celtic stream with druid priests found its way into Christianity, and how Christianity recognised what already lived in the Celtic stream and the two become one in a significant way. Michaël quoted from a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in London in which he speaks of a stream coming from the east, where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, moving westward across the Roman Empire. There was another stream that was also Christian that recognised the coming of Christ and recognised the Mystery of Golgotha, not in the event, but in world and life of nature. This pre-Christian stream, connected with the Celts, originated in the west of Europe and encountered the westward moving stream. The Celtic stream had a strong connection across the English Channel between the southwest of England, Cornwall and Devon, and Brittany in modern-day France. (Brittany was known as Little Britain and Cornwall and Devon were known as Great Britain.) From this centre the Celtic stream spread outward, and we find it strongly represented in Chartres, and it spread through what is today Wales and across the sea to Ireland. The connection of the druids with Stonehenge is the result of John Aubrey (1626-1697) who postulated this connection. The Celtic tradition existed from about 300 BCE to about 450 CE. This Celtic stream converted to Christianity very easily. One example is when the Christians arrived at the village where Chartres now exists, they introduced the story of the Virgin who gave birth to be greeted with a tradition that had a shrine to the Virgin who would give birth. Chartres Cathedral is built on the site of this shrine. The Celts were awaiting the fulfilment of the tradition to which they held. Stonehenge was probably already in ruins at the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, although the Romans do not have a record of the monument, but they recorded the activities of the druids who mainly held their ceremonies in clearings in forests. The druidic lore was enshrined in long verses that took a novice up to twenty years to commit to memory. If the druidic lore contained knowledge of the astronomy connected with Stonehenge it would have been passed on by word of mouth as there is no record of writing from the Celtic culture. Stonehenge is probably 4,000 years old and was built in the Neolithic Period, starting about 7,000 BCE (the same time that Rudolf Steiner gives as the beginning of the first Post-Atlantean Epoch, Ancient Indian Epoch, 7,200 BCE to 5,067 BCE). This is the period where human beings begin to grow crops and build villages. Stonehenge would have been built in the Ancient Egypto-Chaldean Epoch. This was the beginnings of a cultural civilisation, and it is no accident that we refer to cultivating crops and agriculture, because these were connected with the development of human culture. Stonehenge was built as a temple and it has been shifted because it was built so that the northmost point of the sunrise can be observed on the longest day – midsummer, 21 June. When the position of the sunrise moved the stones of Stonehenge were shifted to follow the sun. Stonehenge is built with two types of stones: the large stones that form the pillars with lintels are sarsen stone (sandstone) derived from the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire (about 30km north of Stonehenge); and smaller bluestone (an igneous dolerite) from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales about 240km away. The bluestones would have been transported by sea to the southwest English coast and then across the Salisbury Plain. The earliest record that we still have of Stonehenge dates to 70 years after the Norman Conquest in which it was described as a Great Wonder of Ancient Britain. The impression that the site had on Michaël is the effect of the light of the sun, especially in the way the clouds are lit up. There are carvings on the standing stones that are clearly connected to the stone carvings in Brittany, especially the burial passageways. The building of a temple such as Stonehenge would have taken the entire community to build. This reveals the significance of the temple to the community. Stonehenge would not have been built be a company of builders. The builders were very good astronomers and able to calculate very accurately the layout of this construction. They also built it first in wood and then committed it to stone. The presentation moved to Tintagel. Tintagel is a small peninsula of land that outcrops into the ocean. The seaward part of the peninsula is separated from the land by a deep cut into the rock with a narrow access across. This made the seaward part of the peninsula easy to defend and it bears the ruins of a castle built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall (1209 – 1272). But this castle lies on the ruined foundations of earlier fortifications. The interest in Tintagel is that it is here that the castle in which King Arthur was born is believed to have been located. At Tintagel one can experience the power of nature. In 1924 Rudolf Steiner gave lectures near Tintagel and then in London on 27 August 1924 in which he spoke about the pre-Christian stream and the Christian stream coming together. “Today I can speak of this earlier form of Christianity by starting from impressions … in Tintagel whence proceeded the spiritual stream connected with King Arthur. It was possible to receive the impressions which can still come today at the spot where King Arthur’s castle with the Round Table stood; impressions which came, above all, from the magnificent natural surroundings of this castle. At this place, where nothing but ruins remain of the old citadel of King Arthur, where we look back as if in memory across the centuries that have elapsed since the Arthur stream went out from thence. We realise how stone after stone has so crumbled away that there is hardly anything to be recognised of the old castles that were once inhabited by King Arthur and those around him. But when, with the eye of spirit, we look out from the place where the castle once stood, over the sea with its iridescent colours and breaking waves, the impression we get is that we are able at this place to penetrate deeply into the elemental secrets of nature and of the cosmos.”
Later he says: “If in the first five centuries of our era (the Christian era) human beings looked out over the sea and had been prepared by the exercises practised by the twelve who were around King Arthur and who were concerned above all with the mysteries of the zodiac, if they looked out over the sea they could see not merely the play of nature but they could begin to read a meaning in it, just as one reads a book instead of merely staring at it. And as they looked and saw here a gleam of light, there a curling wave, here the sun mirrored on a rocky cliff, there the sea dashing against the rocks it all became a flowing, weaving picture, a truth whose meaning could be deciphered and when they deciphered it they knew of the spiritual fact of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha was received to them because the picture was all irradiated by the Life Spirit of Christ presented to them by nature. Yonder, in Asia (Asia Minor or the Middle East) the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place and its impulse had penetrated deeply into hearts and souls of human beings. We need only think of those who became the first Christians to realise what a change had come about in their souls. While all this of which I have been telling you in the West, the Christ who had come down to earth, leaving his Spirit Human on the Sun, and his Life Spirit in the atmosphere around the earth, bringing down his Ego and his Spirit Self to the earth, the Christ was moving from east to west in the hearts of human beings through Greece, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain, across Europe. The Christ worked here in the hearts of human being while over in the west he was working through nature. So, on the one hand we have the story of the Mystery of Golgotha legible in the book of nature, for those who were able to read it, working from west to east. It represented, as it were, the signs of the higher graduates of King Arthur’s Round Table. And on the other hand, we have a stream flowing from east to west, not in wind and air, not wave and water, not over hills or in the rays of the sun but flowing through the blood, laying hold of the hearts of human beings from Palestine through Greece into Italy and Spain.” Steiner mentions the places with which Tintagel was trading before the birth of Christ in this movement of the stream westward from Palestine through the hearts of human beings. Tintagel was established as a place only during the Roman Empire and traded in tin. We know the places with which they traded through the archaeological remains at Tintagel. These were from North Africa, Palestine, Greece, Asia Minor, Spain and southwestern France. They traded tin for oil, wine, glassware and more, the archaeological remains of which can be found at Tintagel. One can experience in nature what Steiner describes, and Michaël presented photos of the nature that he had experienced on his visit in October. If Arthur was born in Tintagel, he was buried in Glastonbury. There is a site that marks his grave in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. Glastonbury Abbey was built between 1184 CE and 1230 CE – a period of history that was also significant in the building of Salisbury Cathedral and Wells Cathedral. The Abby was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539 CE. The only part of the Abbey that was not destroyed was the cookhouse. Glastonbury has been associated with Christianity from the earliest times. The conversion to Christianity began in Canterbury, hence the leadership still resides in the Archbishop of Canterbury. The great spiritual leader was St Augustine of Canterbury. There is an older tradition that Joseph of Arimathea, the uncle of Jesus, traded with Great Britain and after the crucifixion brought the cup of the last supper to Glastonbury and drank from the well very near the site of the Abbey. He may have dropped the cup into the well or placed it in the well for safekeeping. The legend also goes that he planted his staff in the ground at the well when he lay down to rest and the staff took root and grew into a tree that flowers once in spring, around Easter, and a second time at Christmas. Cuttings from the original tree, preserved by locals, were replanted near the well after the Abbey was brought to ruin, in the dissolution of the monasteries, and the tree was uprooted and burned. Glastonbury is a meeting of the Arthurian stream and the Grail stream. Glastonbury carries a sense of Christianity in Britain from before the Great Christian Conversion. There is the association of the Christianity that was carried in the soul of Joseph of Arimathea from Palestine across Europe to Britain meeting with the stream of pre-Christian Christianity that recognised the Mystery of Golgotha in the powerful picture language of nature that carried the Life Spirit of Christ and the event of Golgotha and could be read by those who had the initiate capacity to do so. |
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