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

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