The Christian Community in North America

Renewing Christian Community

The Creed of The Christian Community contains the line: Communities, whose members feel the Christ within themselves, may feel united in a church to which all belong who are aware of health-bringing power of the Christ.

This thought starts with the fact of individuals who are aware of Christ’s healing power working within themselves. What this might mean may be slightly different for any given person.

For the one, it may be the awareness that ever and again, he or she rises out of fatigue or illness to renewed strength and health. He becomes aware that the name for this resurrecting, healing force at work within is Christ.

For another it may mean an awareness that, despite considerable failings and shortcomings, she knows that she is loved and somehow carried. And she knows and recognizes that the name for this force of surrounding love is Christ.

For another it may mean looking back over one’s life so far, and recognizing in it a coherence, a meaningful pattern. In this coherent pattern, one might see that even, the valleys became places of change, and of transformation. And one sees that these transformations, these resurrections into something new, is the Christ’s will working to heal our lives.

Out of this kind of awareness, individuals can feel themselves united in a community with others who also are aware of His healing power. Such communities and their members can together be a part of a larger, an invisible church beyond churches. This invisible supra-church is not a church founded on belief; nor is it a church based on dogma or teachings; it is a church grounded in awareness, based on experience.

It is this experience, this awareness of Christ’s healing power in one’s own life, and in the lives of others, that is the true basis of Christian community. Despite our possible differences in belief, in temperament, in thinking, we are united in our experience of Christ as a healing force in our lives. We can recognize Him at work in others. This is the real basis for Christian community. And through such Christian communities, we can possibly become conduits for His healing power in all the various communities to which we belong.

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA

Essays and Articles

Becoming Truly Human

We often use the term ‘only human’ to convey our weaknesses and our failings. But there is a further dimension to our being human. It is a dimension connected with the future, and with developing and expanding our specifically human potential.

We all have a physical, material form. In this, we are like the rest of the mineral world. This physical form, our body, is moreover alive; it breathes, it reproduces, it metabolizes. In these living functions, we have capacities that we share with the plants. We also have feelings and emotions; we act and react; we perceive and cognize. In this we are akin to the animals.

What is left? Where are we uniquely human?

One of the places in which we are uniquely human is in our self-awareness. We are aware of ourselves, as a self, as a unique and more or less discrete entity. We have a memory of that self that goes back to early childhood. Furthermore, this self-aware self is capable of learning to do what it cannot yet, to be what it is not yet. This capacity is far greater than what can be trained in an animal.

This self is also capable of shame (self-judgment), and is capable of conscience, of knowing what kinds of decisions I can or ought to make in the future. Animals act and react by instinct (so do we, sometimes, out of our animal nature). But human beings can act as a sole result of their thinking. And thinking is a basis for creativity.

This is because human beings can make decisions. They can decide to over-ride their natural instinct for self-preservation. They can decide to overcome the instinct for preservation of the species if necessary. Human beings can set goals and figure out the steps to realize those goals. They can create works of art. They can try to consciously serve what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.

Human beings can also decide to put someone else first. In other words, human beings can decide to over-ride their plant and animal natures and can consciously participate in their own further evolution.

So, becoming truly human is not merely to rue our failings and weaknesses. Rather, becoming truly human involves building the strength of our self-awareness and the power to carry through on our decisions in creative ways.

At the same time, becoming truly human involves developing the capacity, paradoxically, to override our own naked self-interest, and to learn to sacrifice, to make an offering for the benefit of others.

In the Sunday Service for the Children, we hear that human life becomes desolate and empty without love. We also hear that Christ is the Teacher of Love. To become truly human is to become a student on the Christ path. On this path we are learning how to love, creatively. We set ourselves upon this path when we decide to carry out our intention to evolve ourselves along a trajectory of love.

Where are we uniquely human? In those moments when our creative self shines forth selflessly.

Teaching/Learning	—	Receiving the Message
Offering/Giving	—	Offertory
Changing/Transforming	—	Transubstantiation
Uniting	—	Communion

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA

Essays and Articles

The “Cosmic Our Father” and the Lord’s Prayer

On September 20, 1913, on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone for the first Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner spoke of a fifth gospel, and gave “as a first revelation of the fifth gospel . . . the primeval macrocosmic world-prayer which is connected with the Moon and Jupiter, even as the four gospels are connected with the Earth.” The prayer sounds thus:

AUM, amen!
The evils prevail,
Witness of unleashing of egohood,
Incurred through others, selfhood-guilt,
Experience it in daily bread
In which heaven’s will does not prevail
Since man departed from your kingdom
And forgot your names, You fathers in the heavens.

In lectures later that year Rudolf Steiner spoke further about this prayer. On October 5 and 6 in Oslo he told how these words were experienced by Jesus of Nazareth in an event some years before the baptism, spoken by a voice out of the spiritual world. Steiner told further how then later the Christ Jesus transformed these words into what we know as the Lord’s Prayer.

In what way can we imagine the words of this “macrocosmic Our Father” as a prayer? By far the greatest number of prayers to be found in the Bible are in the psalms of David. There are prayers of supplication, prayers of thanks, and also prayers of praise. Something of each of these is contained in the Cosmic Our Father, but in mirror form. The words do imply a supplication that is not fully expressed. Rather than thanks, we can hear the statement of a condition where all hope is lost. And praise is replaced by a sense of loss.

Whose voice can we imagine speaking the words? The situation that called them forth was described by Rudolf Steiner as arising from Jesus’s experience of compassion for the God-forsaken people in the neighborhood of Judea. He characterized the voice as “the transformed voice of the Bath-Kol”, that voice which was the last remnant of what had been the spiritual inspiration of the Hebrew prophets. But what we can understand further of the nature of the voice derives from the words themselves.

September 16, 2011/0 Comments/by CCNA

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