Latest News

Kitchen Chat and more…

The Meaning of the Earth

On Easter we celebrate a victory. It is the day we strive to recognize how a certain being died and then overcame death, changing death itself forever.

But that little word ‘death’ seems to have lost its sting, its immediate and visceral power, and so it can be hard for us to develop any kind of feeling for what Easter really is. Indeed, who is really afraid of death anymore? When surveys are taken of people’s greatest fears, it doesn’t even make the top ten.

But Meaninglessness – that is truly scary.

For us, being alive but severed from all purpose, direction and meaning is far more frightening than death. Indeed, it is this experience that causes countless souls to seek death as a way of escaping this feeling. This experience is the abyss that opens up in our time, in our age. For us, this experience of being severed from meaning and purpose is the experience of a death while we are still alive. This is why the ‘walking dead’ emerges as an imagination in our culture. And this is the deeper background behind the unique and new expression of the Easter message in our service: Christ is risen to us as the meaning of the earth.

In order to enter more deeply into this Truth we can imagine a river, flowing, full of life toward the great goal of the delta where it becomes one with the mighty and immeasurable mother-ocean. Now imagine that this river is life. Not just the things happening around us but imagine it is the life element itself, in all its fullness, vitality and meaning. This river is The Life of the World, full of direction and purpose.

Now imagine being in that river, being a part of that river, a part of life, flowing with the same sense of direction, integrated in the deep flow of existence, towards its ultimate goal. But then imagine being spat up on the banks of that river and sitting on the side on the barren rocks, unable to re-enter the flow, going nowhere. That is a place, a very distinct place in the universe, that dry bank outside of the river of life, and it can only be found here on earth.

How does someone speak who knows this experience, who knows this place?

All is in vain…

That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said,

“See, this is new”?

This is the voice of a king of Israel:

^“I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.”

In such a voice the writer of Ecclesiastes speaks, a profound book to find as a part of the sacred scripture (written some 400 years before Christ). “All is vain” it speaks, and this word there can be alternately translated as futile, absurd or non-sense. Gautama Buddha came to a similar if even more painful analysis of life on earth expressed in the Four Noble Truths: All life is suffering.

In the gospels, as well, we can hear this voice, spoken from the Cross by Jesus. There he experiences that same part of the Universe we call ‘earth,’ that part that is truly distant from God, fallen out of the great river of life-pulsing purpose and meaning, saying: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” At the culmination of his journey from divinity to humanity, Christ tasted that empty place, that horrific void: the place separated from all meaning and purpose that our creed calls, ‘the grave of the earth.’ He went there; he went in there.

And that was the key. The God of the River, The God of the Life-Stream of Mankind, the God of the warm flow of purpose-filled, spirit-radiant meaning – He entered the emptiness place. The God of Life entered Death. And death has never been the same.

By pouring Himself into the empty place, by entering the grave, he transformed it into something else; He changed that dark place within the earth into a kind of womb, a cocoon from which the spirit-filled human being may rise. This is the victory. Through Christ’s pouring himself into the earth through his blood on the rock of Golgotha, the grave has become a womb for the birth of our true humanity. Death no longer makes all things vain; it has been integrated into the story of life. And this means that the earth herself has been united with her purpose. She is no longer just a grave for the human spirit. Through Christ the grave of the earth becomes the womb for our higher being.

And now we can say, as we do to the children during each Sunday Service: He leads what is living into death that it may live anew. We need only seek His presence while we are in this place. For, now He is here. And when we feel His presence, the presence of the One who rises out of the tomb – when we feel the uplift of His pulsing life within our blood, we enter into the very substance of Easter and feel His victory over death. Through Christ, death becomes not something separated from meaning, separated from spirit, separated from God, it becomes the element Christ leads us into in order that our highest Self can be born and rise.

And so, perhaps, we begin to understand in our depths why the Easter message appears in our movement for religious renewal in a completely new and potent form, expressed in the words: Christ is risen to us as the meaning of the earth.

***

Join Rev. Patrick Kennedy for Initiation of the Heart: Deeper dimensions of the practice of compassion in our time and the revelation of the Fifth Gospel, a three part webinar series hosted by the Anthroposophical Society in America.

When: Wednesdays April 11, May 2, May 16 from 7:30-8:30 pm (Eastern)

Why: In this three-part webinar we will explore a signature experience of being alive in our time – the overwhelming experience of taking in the suffering of the world. We will ask, “Why is divine wisdom leading us into these experiences?” To answer this question we will delve into Rudolf Steiner’s research called “The Fifth Gospel,” a gospel uniquely appearing in our time. We will especially focus on the so-called, ‘unknown years’ of Jesus, from age 12 to 30, where his path leads him through experiences that open him up to become a bearer of the world healer, the one we know of as ‘Christ.’

April 11: Feeling the World: The “world significance” of our inner lives

May 2: Initiation of the Heart: Jesus and his path to becoming the bearer of Christ

May 16: Pentecost and the Healing Language of the Heart

Where: Online with Zoom. (Can’t join us for the live webinars? No problem. All registered participants will receive emailed recordings within 24 hours of each live event.)

How: Register at this link. $40 suggested donation.

***

To read about how we celebrate Easter at the altar in the Christian Community, visit our festivals page. You can also find an Easter-tide children’s story here.

April 9, 2018/1 Comment/by CCNA

Blog, Inspirational Prayers

from the wounds

The Creator God, the Logos, the Cosmic Son, emptied himself of his mighty power and descended into a human being. God became fully human in Jesus, through suffering what we suffer, being hungry, tempted, misunderstood and wounded even unto death. We call this being Jesus Christ. And in this Easter time, we celebrate His resurrection and His transformation of what makes us human. For if we look closely at the Risen One, what is most human, His wounds, remain – His wounds remain but are different- changed. Healing power now radiates to us from His wounds.

Because of this, within each one of us there is now also this healing power. And this healing power is calling each one of us to accept and take hold of our wounds, calling us to transform in His image so that our wounds, too, can radiate healing power to others.

But so often we would silence this power in us. Instead of entering and working through the pain like Christ, we would deny, escape, blame.

And yet, individuals everywhere take up this call, take up this power. The doctor – inspired to heal by the pain of having a sick brother, the woman who is barren and then adopts orphaned children, the psychotherapist – inspired to help others because of his broken childhood, the activist working to overcome oppression out of the pain of his people. All are examples of healing power radiating from the wound.

This is how God works in the world, in our lives. Because to be united with Christ means to find deep meaning in our marks of pain – to be united with Christ means to have access to liberating joy even in the midst of suffering.

Dear friends, The Community of Christians is made up of wounded healers, those who radiate healing power from wounds. May this power continue to permeate our hearts, our earth, our humanity.

***

Join Jonah Evans for a webinar, The Heart of Easter: Becoming New, Encountering Christ, hosted by the Anthroposophical Society in America on Tuesday, April 3. Listen live or register to download the webinar later. Click here for more details.

To read about how we celebrate Easter at the altar, visit our festivals page. You can also find an Easter-tide children’s story here.

April 2, 2018/2 Comments/by CCNA

Blog, Essays

What is truth?

And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The altar is a mysterious place. It renders its mysteries only slowly and in stillness. This is why the altar wants to be visited more than once. The religious experience is nourished by its repetition. Religiousness therefore roots in the essence of all things: the sun rises more than one morning; we get to know the seasons through their returning; day and night live by their alternation. The altar gathers the pathways and orbits out of which all repetition can unfold. We come to the altar, leave, and come back. This breathing of coming and going, of appearing and disappearing, gives life not only to the human but also to the divine being. In the interplay of giving and receiving, of concealing and revealing, the divine can mirror itself in the human. For what does it mean to be human? The human being shows and hides itself at the same time. We stand in the world. We live and work in it, experiencing joy and sorrow. That part of us is visible. Another part of us, though, cannot be found in this world. It remains invisible. It withdraws itself. It is there and it asserts itself, but remains removed never the less. This is our spiritual being. We carry this secret part of ourselves to the altar in the Act of Consecration of Man. In doing so, the altar becomes an image of our own being: it is both visible and veiled. It waits and is patient. It grants the fullness of its secrets only to those who return. Faith, Goethe said, is love for the invisible. It is an openness for the secret, a willingness to be addressed. This willingness to receive a revealing word, a blessing gesture, or the silence in between them, is a condition for experiencing the elusive thing that we call truth. For truth is not the mere establishing of a fact. It is not the rendering of a correct assessment or the verification of certain circumstances. Truth is much more than that. “The truth is not a fixed system of concepts that can manifest itself in only one way, but is a living ocean in which the spirit of man lives, and that can bring forth waves of the most different kind at its surface.”[1] (Rudolf Steiner)

The notion that truth is not correctness but a deep, moving force with a surface and hidden depths, opens up new possibilities of thought. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was able to delve into these possibilities with pertinent skill. Versed in Greek, he let the original words speak for themselves. Truth is called aletheia in Greek. This sparked the imagination of Heidegger. Because for the good listener this means, that according to the Greek truth meant bringing something or someone out into the open. The word aletheia is a compound of the word Lethe and its negation, a. In Greek mythology the Lethe is the river that brings forgetfulness. In that respect it is the counterpart of the river Styx, that brings remembrance. Just before a human being is born, he or she wades through the river Lethe. Human beings forget the life they led before they were born. The part of ourselves that we forget about when we enter this world, is the part we leave behind. It is the part of us that remains hidden, sheltered in the spirit. When we die, we remember who we are. Dying is disclosing. We are reunited with our essence, our eternal being, and we awaken. This awakening is brought by wading through the river Styx. When truth is called aletheia, the word itself thus indicates that truth shreds all veils of ignorance. Aletheia means the vindication of what was left behind. It means the opening up of what was closed at birth. The truthful person or truthful event is therefore he or that which stands in the unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of things. For Heidegger it became a matter of great importance not just to grasp this intellectually. He wanted to live this to the fullest of all extents. This he did in thought. It became clear to him that truth is less like a field of stones and more like water. He crossed and followed the Lethe and the ocean of Being opened up to him…

[1] GA 6 Goethes Weltansschauung, Kapittel 1, Persönlichkeit und Weltanschauung.

This post is from an article published in the spring 2018 issue of Perspectives, and can be found in its entirety with the editor’s permission here. To subscribe to Perspectives, and receive issues via email, please visit their site.

March 26, 2018/0 Comments/by CCNA