“I am the true vine and my Father is the vine-dresser.  Every branch of mine that bears no fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He makes pure, that it may bear more fruit.  You have already been purified by the power of the word which I have spoken to you.  Abide in me and I in you.  As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it is given life by the vine, neither can you unless you stay united with me.  I am the vine, you are the branches.  He that remains united with me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.  If a man does not remain united with my being, he withers like a branch that is cut off – such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.

If you abide in me and my words live on in you, pray for that which you also will, and it shall come about for you.  By this my Father is revealed, that you bear much fruit and become ever more my disciples. (John 15: 1-8)

The evangelist John is known for his exquisite, concise vocabulary.  In seeming monotony, well-known themes come back again and again in similar expressions. How often does the word “abide” sound in the parable of the vine!  Time and again we hear the appeal: “Abide in me – and I in you.”  Sometimes it is a plea, then again a promise for the far future.

On second thought, when you read and read again, when you take these words to heart, it turns out that such key words sound in a perfect composition throughout the Gospel of John.  They bear you as on eagle’s wings up out of everyday existence.

How do you do that—abide in His love in a world where we have lost the ground under our feet and where people doubt everything?

Not without reason does the call to abide in Him sound when Christ speaks about bread and wine, about His body and His blood.  Here it is the branch that can bear no fruit on its own, if it does not remain on the vine.  Earlier in the Gospel it is expressed still more drastically: “Whoever truly eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” (John 6:56) Again, how do you do that, remain in Him?

Something of that comes to realization when we eat and drink at the altar.  As earthly and disillusioned as it sounds, in the communion Christ is incorporated.  We can then literally and bodily experience: Christ is in us.  But when we have eaten and drunk Him, something is still lacking.  At the Last Supper this was voiced with the words: “Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19)  He says:

I have given myself to you.

Reflect on what you have received.

Contemplate who it is that you have received.

Bring this thought to life for as long as it takes for the thought to think itself in you and

to accompany you in silence on your path through life.

Then, when you willingly and knowingly walk with me, I shall change you.

Then I abide in you and you in me.

 

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, April 26, 2026

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

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.

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.

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