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“Ask, and it will be given you.” (Matthew 7:7)

If things were as simple as it sounds in this sentence, all our questions would be answered and all our desires fulfilled.  But the reality of life is very different.  How often have we asked the spiritual world a question, fervently prayed for help—and no answer ever came.

But did we ask the right question?  Or did we perhaps not hear the answer because we were expecting something very different?

We have in our world, which always focuses on outer results, lost the knack of asking questions.  Even worse, it has often become a caricature.  The spiritual world does not take to cheap questions, and even less to cheap answers.  Real questions need time to be born.  To ask a real, honest question, you have to nurture it, brood on it, until it has ripened.  For, everything we ask of the divine world is subject to the plea: Not my will, but Your will be done.

It makes no sense to ask to be spared illness, suffering, and evil.  Prayer is no means against evil, but a means to make the best of even the worst that happens to us.  In every human life there will come temptations that threaten to exceed our forces.  There are not only things like ordeals to test us, enlighten us, and initiate us, but there is also darkening, and failed initiation.

But when the hardest ordeal comes, when you think: I can’t do it anymore—remember then the plea of Christ during His greatest temptation:

“Father, if it be your will, then let me be spared this cup.

But not my will but your will be done.” (Luke 22:42)

No human being stood by Him.
He was not spared suffering.
But an angel strengthened Him.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, August 4, 2025

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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Hardly has peace been established somewhere, and it is broken again and superseded by chaos and fighting.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

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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.

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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

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Easter

Easter

Nature is the teacher of art.

Natura artis magistra, is an old saying.

What art does nature teach us?

Of old one knew the art of living and of dying: ars vivendi and ars morendi.

But above all, nature teaches us the art of living IN dying.

What for us humans is often a battle of life and death is self-evident for nature.  Unceasingly, she teaches us: no life is possible without death.  Or, in the words of a well-known author: Death is the trick of nature, to have much life.*

Look with how much apparent ease a tree brings forth its blossoms at this time of the year, and how obviously and effortlessly it drops its wealth of flowers in the wind, so that all the color and scent has passed away in a few days.  Would we humans ever succeed in dropping everything that has flourished in our lives with such ease and letting it pass away—in the realization that only that which dies can produce fruit?  If there is one place where the secret of life and life out of death comes to appearance, it surely is nature.

That is what the altar prayer of Easter time wants to tell us: the earth itself has become luminous.  Spirit-shining sun power streams through the earth.

By His death and resurrection, the germ was laid in the dying earth existence for a new earth.  And we begin to share in His resurrection if we become pupils of the master of art, nature.  She teaches us how in every tree, bush, and plant new life is born from death.

Thus Christ teaches us how from His death, if one day we die in Christ, resurrection is born.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, April 15, 2024

 

* Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Der Tod ist der Kunstgriff der Natur, viel Leben zu haben.

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John 8 – The Adulterous Woman

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

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Passiontide

Just as in history there are eras of blossoming that you can compare with spring tide, we are also familiar with autumn tides of humanity, when all that has bloomed dies.  Author Roland Holst expressed this sense of an approaching end with the words:

… that I was born in the autumn of a world

And have to die in it.

 

We all have death at our heels—even more, he has become our inseparable companion.  You could despair in a world where so much is doomed to death, degenerates, and falls apart.  But try to think that everything would stay the same.  Just imagine that no one and nothing would die anymore—that is perhaps the worst that could happen to us.  What is doomed to death must die, to make space for new life.

In these days the altar has become black.  This color—or rather, this absence of all color—is more than the herald of irrevocable death.  If we dare to face death, if we dare to go through the eye of the needle, we come to know a form of life that is born from death.  We then look beyond the fall of a world in which everything has to die sooner or later.  Then you can say together with the poet:

I will no longer see the blades

Nor ever bind the sheaves again

But give me faith in the harvest

For which I serve.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, March 4, 2024

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“He must increase, I must decrease.”

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.

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Centennial

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being had its life in him, and the life was the light of human beings. And the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not taken hold of it.

A man came into being, sent from God; his name: John. He came as a witness, to bear witness concerning the light, so that all people might find faith through him. He was not the light, but was there to bear witness concerning the light.

The true light, which lightens every human being, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own place, and his own people did not accept him. But to those who received him, he gave the power to become children of God: to those believing in his name, who were born not out of blood, nor out of the will of flesh, nor out of the will of a man, but out of God.

And the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we beheld the revelation of his glory: a revelation as of the one born from the father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness concerning him and cried out, saying: “This was the one of whom I said: ‘The one coming after me has taken his place before me, for he was before me.’ ” For from his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen a god; the one born god, being in the inmost being of the father: he has made him known.

John 1

One hundred years ago today, the Act of Congregation of Man first appeared on earth in the form in which we know it today. It was brought out of the spiritual world to 45 men and women who had resolved to bring it out into the world to the best of their abilities. During those days a hundred years ago, every Act of Consecration was also an ordination. And from those people who were ordained and from their deeds, there has grown the movement to which we may all look for the renewal of our link to the spirit, for the healing of our ways on earth, for the healing of the earth.

For those who have taken up the calling of the priesthood, that first service still resounds, echoed every time the service is celebrated anywhere in the world, now in over twenty different languages. There are also closer links. Every time a priest celebrates the service, we may hear the echo of the first time that priest celebrated. And this is not limited to priests. Each of us can recall the first time we experienced the service. So, all of us are ultimately linked back to that one Act of Consecration of Man which took place a hundred years ago today.

We may stand at rest with that connection, for it is there now forever. But then we may ask: where will this great deed of a hundred years go into the future? The past is given; the future is filled with questions, questions which will find their answers according to our deeds.

Our creed begins in eternity. It continues through the great event of the past, into the present and the future, to end with the repeated word “may”, the realm of human freedom. In this realm of freedom lies the answer to the questions that may arise about the future arising from that great deed one hundred years ago.

September 16, 2022, Rev. Michael Brewer

Picture: The First Goetheanum. The first Act of Consecration of Man, was celebrated on the top story of the wing seen on the right.

 

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

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

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