True friends are people who prove themselves over time. They truly listen in a way that draws out of us strengths we did not know we had. They stand by us in our trials, offering their support. Their constancy gives them a depth of knowledge about us, both of our strengths and of our weaknesses that allows them to be a gentle and loving mirror in which we can truly see ourselves. The result is that we are known. We feel accepted, just as we are. We are loved.
The Christian Community in North American would like to welcome Mary Hirsch as our first Legacy Giving Coordinator. Ms. Hirsch has been hired by The Region to assist our individual communities in the development of their own Legacy Giving Programs.
Ms. Hirsch brings to this new position over 23 years of extensive experience ranging from public relations and marketing to planned giving, major gifts and capital campaign management. She has worked in large non-profit organizations, state universities, two Waldorf schools and a charitable foundation. As the Advancement Director at Kimberton Waldorf School, she launched Waldorf Works – a mission-based sustainable fundraising program that attracted over 500 people to campus over two years. She was Director of Development at the Waldorf School of Princeton, Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Director of Planned Giving at Rider University. Read more
Life comes to us with many simple yet essential blessings whose value we often forget about until we no longer have them. We take such blessings as water to drink, food to eat, talking to someone freely or even simply taking a walk; we take them for granted until we have them no more. This is one of the faces of the war. It shows itself by taking away from normal people the essentials of life. How does a war start? How does it grow to last for years? How is it that in our lifetime, we, the citizens of the earth, have not yet found a way to extend a hand to stop it, to transform it? Not yet. The war in Syria has been going on for over two years. It is now extending beyond Syria. Thousands of people have died. Thousands of people have become homeless and are in danger of dying. Read more
https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.png00CCNAhttps://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.pngCCNA2013-07-30 11:18:312013-07-30 11:18:23Living in the Midst of a Battleground: The War in Syria
Generally knowledge is acquired through experience. Often it results from our having perceived a pattern: every day, at predictable times, the sun rises and sets. Therefore, I know that the sun rises and sets on a daily basis. I also know, either from close observation or from the observations of others, that there is a gradual shift of the point on the horizon at which it rises or sets, and that this shift from one extreme to the other and back takes a year to complete. Generally knowledge is related to the past and is founded on past experience.
But even a single event, a single experience, can give us knowledge. The sun rose this morning; I saw it; there is such a thing as sunrise. An angel appeared to me; I saw it; I know that angels exist. Read more
How important it is to be heard. It seems to be a deep, even existential, need. How sensitive we can be to the slightest nuances when someone speaks. Before we learned to speak, we learned to hear.
We have all gone through a profound school of hearing and listening before we were born. The wondrous images of the embryo in the womb show that its shape is like a large ear. The ear itself is shaped like an embryo. Is it only coincidence? The ear is always open and receptive. Might it be that it was not only the heart-beat of the mother the embryo was hearing? Does the ear-shaped embryo possibly indicate that the whole human being is listening as a totality? Or, that the human being is “heard into existence”? What depth of hearing that would be! Read more
https://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.png00CCNAhttps://www.thechristiancommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/logoBLK-1.pngCCNA2013-06-25 12:09:002013-06-25 12:14:55To Hear Is To Be Near
Where can one begin in considering how Christianity might be reconciled with a belief in reincarnation? Perhaps a starting point for moving in this direction would be an acceptance that the human spirit is eternal. That the spirit of the human being does not come into existence only at the start of life but that it exists firstly in the world of spirit and from there enters the earthly world.
The human spirit is eternal: “Into whatever human sheath I have been born, my real being is both unborn and deathless”. The Christmas Festival in the Changing Course of Time, Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, December 22, 1910.
With this understanding we see the human soul as crossing the threshold from the spirit world into the physical world at birth and again crossing this threshold at the moment of death as it returns to the world of spirit. Read more