For centuries the traditional Church has tried to ban St. John’s story of the adulterous woman from the Bible.  In some Bibles it is missing even today.  Why?

Without a trace of judgment Christ forgives what a person has done.  He does not condemn.  Isn’t that a license to commit adultery?

You could compare the people who want to ban this story from the Bible with the Scribes and Pharisees, who could not imagine guilt without penalty.

This is a deeply rooted tendency that is still there in each of us.  We may not penalize the mistakes of others with stones, but we proclaim devastating judgments, which lead a life of their own in our media and make the perpetrators into culprits.  We think and speak evil about people who, in our eyes, are wrong.  We ridicule people who, in our eyes, are stupid.  But also in our day the saying is true: “Whoever among you is free of sin let him throw the first stone…”

Adultery – every human being is guilty of it.  Someone has given it name: “Cosmic adultery.”  That is what philosopher Saint Martin calls our collective separation from the divine world.  We are detached from God, and in consequence of this we are detached from everything and everyone around us.  God has not abandoned us, but we, each one of us, have turned away from Him.  By our cosmic adultery we have lost the spirit.

And only by becoming aware of the loss of the spirit grows our longing for the awakening of the spirit.

And only through Him who, like a lamb, bears the sins of the world, is the abyss bridged that separates us from God.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, March 17, 2024

The ego is the shadow of a great light.  In a world where egoism reigns supreme we often imagine: the ego, that am I.

But if that is the only reality, what is then left of us at the end of our life?  When someone becomes old and decrepit, gradually all the capacities disappear on which our ego is based.  Nothing happens of itself anymore, until we eventually become dependent on the help of other people.  The light of self-consciousness weakens, flickers, and goes out.  What is then left of us?

What is left on earth is what we call the mortal remains, an empty husk that soon falls apart.  Earth to earth; ash to ash.

But death is much more than the inglorious end of life on earth.  It is the time when the wheat is separated from the chaff.  As the shadow of the ego fades, the light of the Spirit grows.  Christ stands at every deathbed and receives the harvest of every human life.  Only then does the dying person recognize: Christ is the light of my shadow.

Countless people live as if there will never be an end to their ego, until the irrevocability of the end of life cannot be ignored anymore and there is no longer a way back—only forward, through the eye of the needle.

We don’t need to wait for that moment.  We can also try, in the midst of life while we are fully engaged in our everyday existence, to begin to walk this way forward.  Then we begin to realize: I am very small, and the world that stands behind me is very large.  The greatest of all people on earth, who became the smallest of all, let the light of his shadow manifest with the words: “He must increase, I must decrease.”

Then only, if these words are fulfilled in life and death, is the promise fulfilled: “Christ in me.”

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, July 3, 2023.

Feeding the Five Thousand (Lk.9:12-17)

Three times during His life on earth Christ shares a meal with people around Him—at the feeding of the five thousand of the four thousand, and of the twelve.  All three times He does the same: He takes the bread, He looks up to Heaven, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to the people.   It is the same gesture we recognize when the bread is consecrated at the altar.  In these acts He bestows imperishable life forces on the bread; it becomes “medicine of immortality.”  That is what this meal was called in earliest Christianity, pharmakon athanasias.  A meal that goes with us on the path of life, beyond death, into deathless life.

In the Act of Consecration of Man an expression is used for this which has fallen into disuse: “the bread for the way.”  The German word used here, Wegzehrung, literally means “food for on the way.”

At the feeding of the five thousand, when this blessed bread is distributed, the evangelist adds: “And all ate and were satisfied…”  We can’t say the same of our everyday bread.  We have hardly eaten and are feeling hungry again.

But when we receive the meal of bread and wine at the altar something else happens.  In that moment what is expressed as a promise in the Act of Consecration of Man becomes reality: “Christ in you.”  From that moment He is in us, literally and figuratively.  And if we make space for Him in us, He subsequently goes with us on our path of life, as bread for the way for our eternal being.

When we realize what we receive, Whom we receive, with the meal of bread and wine, that which happened at the miraculous feeding of the five thousand is fulfilled again: “And all ate and were satisfied…”

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, August 14, 2022

In our world peace is hard to find.  Even if we live in a country with relatively uneventful circumstances, the discord of the world pushes its way into us from all sides.  We only have to open the door or open the newspaper—the chaos of the world comes into us from all sides.  Peace feels like a fata morgana that looms up on the horizon from time to time, and then disappears again without a trace in the desert of every day.  How can you live in such a world and at the same time be at peace with the world?

And yet, the Act of Consecration of Man says of Christ: “I stand at peace with the world.”  For many people of our time this sounds like an unattainable vision that every moment is dashed to pieces again by hard reality.

Christ is at peace with the world.  We would actually have to say it differently, but our language fails us when we try to find the right words.  In the original language of the Act of Consecration it sounds different: Friedvoll stehe Ich zur Welt.  He does not have peace with the world—on the contrary, He places His peace face to face with it.  If He were at peace with the world as it is, He would leave everything as it is without undertaking anything.  That is our traditional, authority-oriented picture of peace, where everything comes to a standstill: Rest in Peace.  But that is not even true for the deceased, for they have to ceaselessly work on their purification.

The peace of Christ is not of this world.  It is wrested free from death and the underworld.  He wants to share this most precious gift of the Resurrection with us, so that we may bear His peace, which passes all understanding, with us in a restless world.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Summer 2022

At this time of the year the waterlily, the queen of the water plants, is blooming in many places in our country [Holland]—in ponds, in ditches, even in the drab canals in our big cities.

Waterlilies have a long way to go before out of the mud and water something so beautiful as its snow-white flower is born.  Nymphea alba it is called, the white nymph.  For just like the water beings, just like the nymphs, the flowers strive to come to the surface somewhere and play with water, air, and light.  Rarely is there such a world of difference in the realm of plants between darkness and light, between root and flower.

Looking at the plant you may recognize–what the waterlily does by nature shows us something of the long road that still lies ahead of us.

In every human being inconceivable forces are slumbering that are waiting to be awakened and come to blossom.  In antiquity these were called lotus flowers: invisible flowers that can be awakened to life.  Every human being is all too familiar with the dark bottom in which these forces are rooted—buried under murky thoughts, passions, and desires.  The first step on the path from this murkiness to light is: saying yes to yourself—also to the characteristic that most strongly resists change from temptation to strength.  In every human being lives a hidden longing for light, even when we are trapped in darkness and temptation.

We would not seek the way to the altar if we were not led by the longing for light that guides us upward, step by step.  One day to be reborn from above.  One day to awake and to blossom in a world of light.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, Summer 2022