The Christian Community in North America

New Book by Seminary Director Bastiaan Baan

Lord of the Elements

Interweaving Christianity and Nature

Lord of the Elements cover

The four classical elements of earth, water, air and fire are present in Genesis and the New Testament. But while traditional Christianity moved away from seeing the spiritual in nature, other streams of thought — such as Celtic Christianity, the School of Chartres, medieval mystics like Hildegard von Bingen and the alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone — continued to emphasize the importance of the elements. In this unique book, Bastiaan Baan, an experienced spiritual thinker, brings these elements together with ideas from Anthroposophy. He considers in particular how elemental beings — nature spirits — relate to the four elements, and explores the role of elemental beings in our world. This is a fascinating and original work on the connections between Christianity and the natural world.

The book is available from Floris Books at www.florisbooks.co.uk Read more

April 2, 2013/1 Comment/by CCNA

Blog

A Story of Redemption: By Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a profound excerpt taken from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Father Zossima reflects on his life from his deathbed:

Beloved fathers and teachers, I was born in a distant province in the north, in the town of V. My father was a gentleman by birth, but of no great consequence or position. He died when I was only two years old, and I don’t remember him at all. He left my mother a small house built of wood, and a fortune, not large, but sufficient to keep her and her children in comfort. There were two of us, my elder brother Markel and I. He was eight years older than I was, of hasty, irritable temperament, but kind-hearted and never ironical. He was remarkably silent, especially at home with me, his mother, and the servants. He did well at school, but did not get on with his school-fellows, though he never quarrelled, at least so my mother has told me. Six months before his death, when he was seventeen, he made friends with a political exile who had been banished from Moscow to our town for freethinking, and led a solitary existence there. He was a good scholar who had gained distinction in philosophy in the university. Something made him take a fancy to Markel, and he used to ask him to see him. The young man would spend whole evenings with him during that winter, till the exile was summoned to Petersburg to take up his post again at his own request, as he had powerful friends. Read more

March 31, 2013/0 Comments/by CCNA

Blog, Essays

The Mission of Failure

Failure seems like such a negation. I did not….

It points to the fact that we are imperfect, incomplete; that our reach exceeds our grasp. Yet hidden in that very fact is a positive. I did try. I learned something. Thomas Edison famously said: I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Our failures are great teachers, if we are open to the lessons. As it says in our Sunday Service for Children, we learn so that we may understand and work in the world. We are here to find truth, to expand our understanding of reality, to make a difference in the world. The fact that failure is often humbling is perhaps a lesson in itself – we are not yet all that we want to be. But we may have just found the 9,999^th way that doesn’t work – one step closer to a way that does.

As Saul, St. Paul believed that Jesus couldn’t have been the Messiah. Jesus’ life ended as a failure – he was tortured and executed as a common criminal. Therefore Saul knew he couldn’t have been God the All Powerful’s Son. But what looked like a failed life became The Life, as Paul came to know at Damascus.

Christ came to the earth for the express purpose of becoming a human being. He came to experience, in the flesh, how human beings fail. How they learn. How they find truth. He explored the depths of human existence. And since he is an eternal being, what he did, he does eternally. He experiences the depths of humanity so that He, eternally present, can be here with us when we fail. When we learn. When we find truth, which is ultimately, Him.

March 24, 2013/0 Comments/by CCNA

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