, ,

Peace

Wherever you look around you, in our time peace has become a shaky, unstable concept, both at large in our society, and also in relationships between people.

Hardly has peace been established somewhere, and it is broken again and superseded by chaos and fighting. Even in the individual peace is often elusive—hardly has our inner life been set at rest, and the storm of our changeable moods breaks out again. In nature it is similar. A peaceful landscape can suddenly be drowned in violent rain, or wither in the scorching heat of the sun. Nature holds up a mirror to us of our chaotic, disturbed world. In brief, nothing is as vulnerable today as peace.

The peace that emanates from Christ is beyond compare with our earthly concepts and ideas: “I leave you the peace: my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives.” (John 14:27) When we make an effort to comprehend what we receive with this form of peace, our intellect has to capitulate. What does Christ bestow on us when we for a moment feel His touch with the words: “The peace be with you”? From His suffering, from His death, and from the underworld, He has wrested a substance of peace He always bears with Him, until the end of the world. He is the calm in the storm, the quiet in the chaos, the rise in the decline.

Even if our whole life long we are not able to understand what He bestows on us with this touch, one day we will stand face to face to Him, and He will remind us of what He gave us:
“I leave you the peace: my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives.”

– Rev. Bastiaan Baan, June 10, 2025

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Ascension

Ever since Christ’s Ascension people have a deeply rooted tendency in religious life to look up.  Here on earth, in the “vale of tears,” it can’t be found.  We have a religious homesickness for heaven.  The disciples looked up to heaven when He disappeared from their eyes.  But the angels who stood by pointed in a different direction, back to the earth.  “Why do you stand there looking up to heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up before you into heaven, will come again, revealed in the same way as you have now seen him pass into the heavenly sphere.” (Acts 1: 11)

Where should we look to find Him?  Where did Christ go when He left the earth?  With Ascension He disappeared from view, with the promise of His coming, His coming again.  And what else is the second coming than His heaven on earth?

It is as if by centuries of looking up to heaven we have forgotten to look for Him on earth.  Look at your neighbor, even if he is a stranger to you, even if he is your opponent, even if he is your enemy.  For just as in yourself, in the depth of his being a king is hidden who is waiting to be freed.  His name is: Christ in me.  Christ in you.  Christ in us.

In the words of the poet, Lita Vuerhard:

We await him who from his throne
Will radiantly descend.
His heavens full of angels’ songs.
For centuries we await this now
If it will repeat itself.

Away from the world,
To heavenly pastures
We threw our yearning gaze,
In the highest of all lights
To behold his approach.

But he lies deeply in our soul
Shining as a precious stone.
Come, he calls, I’m worthy of it.
Into the depths for Ascension,
As deep as you can sink!

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, June 1, 2025.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Contemplation on the Service for a Deceased Perso

When a person is dying, in the last weeks or days of life the mask of the everyday personality drops off. It is as if not only the physical sheath, but also the sheath of the soul breaks open. A dying person usually shows himself in all his vulnerability, as he rarely did during life. When you cross the threshold so vulnerably and broken-open, it is not surprising that on the other side of the threshold you are as helpless as a newborn baby. No wonder that in antiquity the day of death was called dies natalis, which means “day of birth.”
A fifteen-year old girl wrote on the day before she died totally unexpectedly a poem with the words:

Two woven hands
Unfold as two wings.
An inexplicable light.
Cries of joy, unheard.
Unborn being,
Forlorn human being,
Helplessly planted.

That is the world of a person who has just died, an unprecedented, unknown world, into which you are helplessly planted. There you need to be enveloped, just like a newborn. Thank God, that help comes in the form of angels’ hands that receive the deceased on the other side. But in the months and years after crossing the threshold, the deceased is still in all his fibers connected with us, the living.

The angels cannot give him the protection he needs by themselves. We humans cannot do that either. But together, angels and living partners in distress, we can help him come home in the land of his birth. That is the meaning and significance of the Act of Consecration for the Dead, just as formerly, in all times and cultures, people prayed for the deceased.

That is why we gather at the altar to accompany our dear deceased with our prayers, with our offering—for them to get wings in the world of the spirit.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, May 18, 2025

/0 Comments/by