​Advent, which this year appropriately falls on 1 December, marks the beginning of the church year, the liturgical year. The year starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It marks the beginning of a new cycle of celebrating the various festivals. See again the recent article on the Michaelmas Conference in which there is a full description of the three sets of three festivals that we notice in our community: the three main festivals of the Father, the three main festivals of the Son and the three main festivals of the Spirit. We are in the transition between the last of the festivals of the Spirit God, Michaelmas, and Advent. 

Advent is a festival of beginning. It is going on an advent-ure. It is a festival of expectancy, an expectancy that carries a sense of what is coming. We can look forward with real hope for what does arrive at Christmas. Advent is the expectancy of a birth, so there is a sense of a gestation. In this case it is not connected to the number 40, but we can work with the number 4. We can carry through the four weeks of Advent the four stages of life as we know it: physical, etheric, astral and spirit-presence, the “I”-constitution. 

We could speak about the elements that we know: the Advent Wreath, the four Sundays, the steps that one can take for Christmas. But that is about being in Advent. How do we prepare for Advent – prepare for a time of preparation? Here is a way of stepping into a relationship before realising the full extent of the relationship. 

Our celebration of Advent follows the church conventions. How do we prepare for something that is so set? 

Here are three experiences in world history where a human being encounters something that they have an association with but suddenly that relationship transforms and a whole new vision appears. They embrace that vision because they realise that in it is something and they are trying to arrive at it. They are trying to work towards the full birth of something. Before they can arrive at the full birth they find themselves in a position where they can no longer influence the world around them, because they cross the threshold. Their sudden expansive vision may live on with others and sometimes it doesn’t. These three instances from history were selected because they are connected with the light of the sun as an inspiration. The reason for this is because the Advent Epistle speaks about the “chariot of the sun”. The three people of whom we are speaking heard a voice in the inner place of the soul (listen to the words of the Advent Epistle) that they heard at hand of the light and how this light manifests in the light of the sun. 

First, we will speak of a prophet who was a priest of the religion of his day. The time that he lived in is often misrepresented because other prophets came in the subsequent centuries who strongly identified with his message and even took his name, or at least, became known to history by his name, so that the dates of these later prophets have become confused with the original. We probably only have the records of the later prophets available in the archaeological record. This prophet was known as Zarathustra or Zoroastra. 

We know something of the story behind this prophet’s moment of insight. He was the priest of a religion of which we have no records. It was a religion in the part of the world between the Mediterranean and India. It had a pantheon of gods. He goes down to the river. He is fully aware of a particular constellation of gods that are important in his religion. In this constellation is a lesser god. While he is bathing in the water of the river he looks up and sees the sun. In this experience of the sun and the light of the sun, he realises that this lesser god is in reality the Great God who has been misunderstood and therefore miscast in the religion of the people into a lesser station. This God he describes as Ahura Mazda which translates as the Lord of Wisdom. He describes this God as the Lord of Light and the creator of the good in the universe. He elevates this Lord of Wisdom and in the development of a way of worship of this Being he describes Him as the God of Light. There is now a new relationship to the light that comes from the Divine. The spiritual light that rays down to the earth that is connected with the light of the sun that we experience, that is related to the light of Divinity. To Zarathustra it presents as the fullness of Divinity, whereas it has previously been seen only as an aspect of Divinity. He then recognises that juxtaposed to the Lord of Light is a Lord of Darkness. This places the human being in the battle of discerning what is Good from what is not Good. Zarathustra now begins to become his own Tree of Knowledge. Within the Zarathustran tradition there is a picture of the future: the Tree of Life. This Tree of Life is rooted in the Water of Life. (In every single Post-Atlantean Cultural Epoch there is to be found in the religious traditions a symbol of the Tree of Life. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is in the process of being achieved within humanity and thus the picture of the future is the Tree of Life.) 

This is not the only occasion in history where someone has connected to the idea of light, and as we see in the next two cases, to the light of the sun and recognising what may be described as a sun god. The association of the sun with forces of creativity, forces of light and forces of life. We can see this association and understanding of Divinity with what we can call the Christ – the Son God. 

The next person was called Amenhotep. He was Amenhotep IV after his father Amenhotep III of Egypt. Amenhotep IV was the father of Tutankhamun, and he changed his name to Akhenaten (Akhnaten). He is often considered to be one of the first monotheists. He recognised Aten as the only god from among the many gods of Egypt. Amenhotep III had named the royal barge, that sailed the Nile, the “Spirit of Aten”. Aten was considered to be an aspect of Ra, the sun god. He was the aspect that is the sun disk that rays its warmth down: 

The warmth of the sun that gently caresses the earth. Akhenaten disallowed the worship of all other gods. He built a new capital for himself, and it all faded upon his death. He understood a relationship to this sun god. (Philip Glass created an opera called Akhnaten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSn_UAquOfw)

The last is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. He was emperor of the Roman empire briefly at the age of fourteen – between 218 – 222 AD. He is better known as Elagabalus. At fourteen he was a priest and high priest of a cult to the sun god, Elagabal, although Elagabal means god of the mountain, brought into Roman Latin from Arabic. This cult stood against the primary cult at the time of Mithras. Elagabalus established the cult of Elagabal in Rome when he became emperor and described the god a Sol Invictus – the invincible sun.

​In some cases he appears with other gods:

​Here we have three occasions in history where someone has the experience: “this is what I have been looking for”. The experience of ‘here is the light that enlightens’, a true picture of what he would describe for his time as the ‘light of the world’. 

This is what Advent is about: preparing ourselves for the light of the world. What appears for us at Christmas is the child that must bear the Christ. The light of this child is born under the sign of the light of the sun. This is what a star is, it is a sun. The star represents the light-being that is descending into this child. It is descending from the heavens to connect with, to touch the earth, and to incarnate into a human being. We experience a step further than Zarathustra, Akhenaten and Elagabalus experienced. We are preparing for an event that takes us from Christmas to Golgotha. The turning point begins when the child is born, the human being that can bear the Christ, but without Golgotha the turning point is not accomplished. 

If our Advent preparation is only about remembering the birth 2000 years ago then we are merely a cult of historical remembering. Our preparation today for what Advent must be, not for the birth of a baby in a manger, but for the birth of Christ in us, in the individual and also in the community. We may, in humility, sometimes have a sense of the Christ in us, but looking into the world we may wonder at where Christ is in the community. Then the question must arise that if I do not see the Christ in the world, does the world see the Christ in me? Do I reflect the Christ for the world? It always comes back to me. 

The preparation for Advent is to spend the time in Advent focussing on Advent 2024, what is coming into being now. What is it to be in the space I am looking for the birth of this being human in the world today. We get four weeks to do this, by focussing on finding the light – connecting to the light that does enlighten us, to see in the depths of darkness. This connects us to the latter part of the Advent Epistle.

​Report by John-Peter Gernaat

Steiner says that if we can spiritually purify our sight and insight, we develop Imagination. If we can spiritually purify our hearing and listening, we can develop Inspiration. And, if we can spiritually purify our thoughts and concepts, we can develop Intuition.

At Michaelmas we are in the festival of our future Intuition, our capacity to clarify our thinking in action – there is often a swing around between thinking and willing with feeling mediating in between. In as much as our thinking must be purified at Whitsun, we must be able to take hold of our clear thinking at Michaelmas.

The development of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition is the reason that the human being will go through the four stages of development.

1. Interest in the other is something we will develop in the next few thousand years.
2. Learning to live into the language of the other will develop thereafter over several thousand years.
3. Breathing one another will develop thereafter.
4. Digesting one another will develop thereafter.

For Anthroposophists:

1. Interest in the other will develop in the Sixth Post-Atlantean epoch.
2. Learning to live into the language of the other will develop in the Seventh Post-Atlantean epoch.
3. Breathing one another will develop in the epochs of the Sixth Earth Age.
4. Digesting one another will develop in the epochs of the Sixth Earth Age.

The exercise undertaken in groups was to discuss Matthew 25: 1-13 in terms of how sight may not yet have led to insight, how hearing does not yet go to listening, and how thoughts do not yet develop into concepts. This reading can show us that how, if we fall short in the areas of these senses, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition cannot develop properly.

When reading this parable, one may think that the ‘Bridegroom’ is a reference to the ‘second coming of Christ’, of the Son of Man. Rather read it as “you do not know the day nor the span of time when you will become the Son of Man”. We must keep preparing for that time in order to be ready. The Foolish Maidens were not ready, they had not developed as they should, there was no oil in their flask. This is not the coming of the Son of Man as an external reality, but rather as an internal reality. It is about us becoming the future human being, and we become the future human being through our efforts. Our efforts are possible when we know how to work with the Grace of God.

The reading Ephesians 6: 10-19 was given to take home and consider in our own time.

In the wrapping up we learned that the Ten Maidens all live in us, they are parts of us. When the Foolish Maidens knock on the doors, the Lord – the higher self – says that he does not know them, in other words, they cannot yet enter the heavens as they still have work to do on themselves. The higher self is not going to be sympathetic to our laziness and the areas in ourselves that we have failed to develop. The door will not open until we are ready.

Rudolf Steiner said, to paraphrase, “the future does not come if it is not prepared early”. In the spiritualisation of our doing, which is the theme of the Michaelmas festival, we become effective when we can express ourselves in terms of the consciousness soul experience.

Michaelmas is how we face the challenges of our time and overcome.

Ephesians 6, the armour of God, is about putting on this armour that is given to us through the Grace of God. The theme of this conference is ‘Effort and Grace in the future human being we are becoming’. Where we put our effort, we meet the grace that makes that effort possible and fruitful.

Michaël concluded the day with two children’s story, the first: We’re going on a bear hunt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyI6ykDwds). It is a story of meeting obstacles that require the protagonists to go through as there is no way over or under. Michael only read and shared the first half of this story. This story is a parable to how we put on the Armour of God, as is the second. The second is by Dr Seuss: Oh the places you’ll go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U60jboHHFs).

​This talk wrapped up the Michaelmas Conference and what Michaelmas time is all about for us in our time.

Michaël reiterated the nine festivals in The Christian Community and how the festivals of the Father and the Son follow chronological time. The three festivals of the Spirit follow on directly from the Ascension. Whitsun does follow chronologically from Ascension but at that moment we shift to Kairos time, being in the present moment.

Michaël reminded everyone of the talk he presented on preparing for Michaelmas, on how we would let the Spirit take hold of us and transform our thinking, our feeling and our willing, suggesting that in the time of Michael we are in activity.

The Conference looked at how our thinking forces are spiritualised so that we may tread the modern path of Christian initiation. We have to come to an understanding of what this modern path of initiation is. There have been ancient paths of initiation for Christianity when we tried to work out how to encounter the spiritual world and how to be with the spiritual world. Initiation has been a part of our understanding of what it is to be human, from the very beginning of becoming conscious of ourselves. The modern path is to learn to establish a community with others through our conscious effort. Not a community that comes about through being part of a family, tribe or village. Today the world allows us to leave where we are born and encounter new groups of human beings with whom we can consciously form community. This is how our thinking forces are spiritualised so that we may follow this modern path of initiation. This is captured in the festival of Whitsun. Our feeling forces are spiritualised so that we may engage in a new art of human interaction or relationships. This is what St John spoke about when he said that we should change our thinking and feeling so that we change our way of doing. This is because we must realise that the Kingdom of God is within us, as we read in the Gospel. The Kingdom of God is not realised in us in isolation, it is realised in us in relation to the other, this modern path of the Christian initiation. The spiritualisation of our feeling forces is thus related to the festival of St John’s. The spiritualisation of our action forces comes at Michaelmas. We must now put in effort, into every aspect of human life, including religious practice: the activity of being human in relating to the divine. The modern path of relating to the divine is learning to relate to other people.

Michaël then described the four stages of social development that were part of the focus on Saturday. Although these stages are developed over the next many thousand years, beginning with the first two stages developing in the next 6 000 years. Rudolf Steiner said, to paraphrase, “the future does not come if it is not prepared early”.

After speaking briefly about these four stages, Michaël then reflected on how these four stages are the four great stages of our development so far, and how these four great stages of our development live in every aspect of our existence and in every festival, and also how they live in four festivals allowing us to sense the seasonal flow of our festivals.

1. Developing a true interest in the other that leads to true love. This is far more that we can develop now, but we must prepare early for the future.
2. Learn to live into the language of the other. Experience the full expression of the other in a way that it becomes as real for us as our own expression of ourselves.
3. Breathe the other person in and out. This seems well beyond our comprehension even. In as much as we all breathe the same air and therefore share the breath of the other person today, in this far future time we shall consciously breathe in the full being of the other on a way that they sustain us and we will breathe ourselves out and into the other in order to sustain them spiritually.
4. Digest the other person. Then we shall be able to sustain each other in the deepest sense of nourishment. Already the angelic worlds look to the human being for nourishment as we have a free power that they do not have. Then, we shall nourish each other through who we have become. Steiner says we must learn now to digest each other in the area of our activity, in what we are doing. This is connected with the karmic relationships we have with others. Steiner said – in summary – we must become co-worker with Christ in the field of karma and develop in this field inner, pure Michaelic forces that allows us gradually to digest our karma because there is really no other way for us to establish a true Christian community on the earth. This is the path of modern Christian initiation. (The sign-board outside on the road should say: “The Christian Community that wishes to become. Join us as we move towards our religious renewal”. It should read as an invitation to practice something for the future. It is an aspiration for our future and not yet a statement of our present.)

This is what it means to be the Michaelic Movement, it means to try to work with each other when we are all from very different backgrounds with very different interests and involved in a very different way of being from each other. We must take an interest, live into the way they express themselves, breathe them in, allow them to breathe me and work through what lives between us. Then we are brothers and sisters. Then we have created a family, not just be born into a family. Even within the family into which we are born we must work at these things to create it into a family. Today, without working on relationships, these relationships break down. Family, today, is created through our own effort. In the past we were born into a family and stayed in that family, without effort because the human consciousness was different. Today, family requires work in order to maintain it.

We look at a relationship between these four: interest, language, breathing and digestion, and the four ethers.

The ethers are life forces that bring about something. There are four principal ethers, and they were developed over great stages in the development of creation. We have gone through three great stages and the Earth stage is the fourth great stage. The Earth stage is the stage that takes us from form to freedom. This is achieved by learning to love. The four ethers are the warmth ether, the light ether, the tone ether and the life ether. We can see these are related to the seasons. This works very well in the Southern Hemisphere. We begin with the warmth ether. We know something about warming; even before a baby is born it is in the womb where it receives warmth. They receive warmth from the adult. But when they are born, they require warmth to thrive. We must warmly welcome them. We envelop them with soul warmth as well as physical warmth. Warmth can be related to the season of summer, and it is the condition of Christmas. We can see the light ether connected with St John’s. We speak about light in our St John’s-tide. The tone ether can be connected with Michaelmas. The life ether can be connected with Easter and the Resurrection.

It is also possible to relate the four ether to each festival So it is possible to relate the four ether to the four states of our Michaelic pursuit of building community. Warmth ether can be connected with ‘interest’. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the sense of warmth that develops in the young person around the age of twelve that must become enthusiasm. When we speak of light we are also speaking of colour and variations of colour. Our language is a variation of colour. Our language can be described as being an expression of the colours of our soul. The tone ether is also called the chemical ether, is connected with sound and listening. When we truly listen to another, we are taking them into ourselves. Similarly, when we feel heard we feel that we have been taken into the other. This is a seed for what will develop in the future when we learn to breath the other in and out. We can relate this to a bell which requires either a clapper on the inside or a hammer on the outside to create a sound, a tone. Without both these parts – bell casing and clapper or bell casing and hammer – there is no sound. Similarly, we need the other to breathe them in and out and to be breathed in and out in return. The tone ether requires another. The life ether requires a process of digestion in this earth stage. There is also a strong connection between digestion and thinking. When we look physiologically at the digestive system and brain there are similarities in form. When we process our thinking, we are digesting. We break something apart and take out what is valuable and let go of what is not valuable. Our digestion can be described as thinking in the gut. We go through a process that we can do in our soul when we can take something and work it through to the point where it has real value and can support and sustain us.

This is how the four ethers live in these processes. These four processes are developing the Christian community of the future. This is exactly what Michaelmas is about. These require effort on the modern path of Christian initiation. We cannot manage this effort on our own. We are only able to do it when we are able to take hold of the grace that Christ offers. We hear in the Michaelmas Inserted Prayer that Christ sends out His power from human hearts. This is where Christ has placed his power. We find the power of Christ from the heart of another human being. We experience the power of Christ only when we are both engaged in the effort of interest, language, and preparing the seeds for future breathing and digestion. We know from scripture that ‘when two or more are gathered in My Name, I am there’. When we gather consciously, we can call forth the power of Christ. When we gather unconsciously, nothing lives between us and the power of Christ is not called forth. Michaelmas is about being conscious and awake to these forces and about building community. Michaelmas is about what it means to develop ourselves for the future. The encouragement is to develop warm interest, listen as much as possible to the colourful tones of people’s language, learn to take others in through all the ways in which we engage with one another, and see how much of the karmic work we can digest so that is does not sit in us like a stone. We must become co-workers with Christ in the field of karma and develop in this field pure Michaelic forces that allows us gradually to digest our karma. There is no other way to establish a true Christian community here on the earth.

Firstly, a contemplation of the festivals. We have a great gift in The Christian Community of being able to penetrate and extend some of the Christian festivals in a way that allows us to take a step into the future. We begin the liturgical year in the way that the Christian church, the wider movement within Christianity has undertaken for centuries; we begin with Advent, the four Sundays before Christmas. We then move straight from the season of Advent into Christmas, consisting of twelve days. This takes us directly into the season of Epiphany which we extend to four weeks. We take a full Epiphany season. One could see this as ‘bookending’ Christmas: four weeks of Advent and four weeks of Epiphany. There are the twelve Holy Nights in between. We look at the festivals of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany as the festivals of the Father God. These festivals bring something to us. The period of Advent: anticipation, waiting, preparing. There is no arriving at a birth unprepared.
 
After these festivals we enter a period of Trinity. The duration is dependent on the arrival of the full moon with the March equinox. Then we enter into three festivals that follow directly on from each other: Passiontide for four weeks, followed by Easter, followed by Ascension. The festivals of Easter follow the traditional periods: forty days of Easter and ten days of Ascension. These fifty days take us directly into another set of festivals.
 
The first is Whitsun, often referred to as Pentecost, the commemoration of the descent of the Holy Spirit. This is followed by a short period of Trinity taking us into four weeks of St John’s-tide. This really extends the St John’s season. Then we have the ten Sundays between St John’s and Michaelmas. Then four Sundays of Michaelmas. This is followed by a short period of Trinity before the liturgical year begins again.
 
Passiontide, Easter and Ascension are seen as the festivals of the Son. Whitsun, St John’s and Michaelmas are seen as the festivals of the Spirit. The Trinity is at work in the festivals. Each set of festivals consist of three festivals. Even within each set of three festivals we can see the working of the Father, Son and Spirit. Thus, Advent can be seen as the Festival of the Father, Christmas as the festival of the Son and Epiphany – making apparent in the full light of the Divine – as the festival of the Spirit. All this within the festivals of the Father. The same is apparent in the festivals of Passiontide, Easter and Ascension: Father, Son and Spirit. Also, in the three festivals of the Spirit: Whitsun, St John’s and Michaelmas we see the activities of the Father, Son and Spirit.
 
Let is now look at how we prepare for Michaelmas. It is one of the festivals of the Spirit and a festival that brings us ever closer into a relationship with the Spirit. In the festivals of the Spirit, Whitsun is the festival of the Father – the gift of the Father sending the Spirit, St John’s about what we need in order to relate to the Christ, and Michaelmas an opportunity to comprehend, grasp, take hold of the Spirit and come to know this in ourselves. This makes Michaelmas the festival of the present and the future.
 
We can look at this in relation to our thinking, feeling and willing over the span of the last two-thousand years.
 
In the Act of Consecration of the Human Being we hear that with the great Mystery of Golgotha, with the offering of the first transubstantiation – the change of the bread and wine into the mystical body and blood of Christ – we also receive again our connection to the Divine (“Godhead is given again …”). We hear of the new confession and the new faith, and we hear that this must be taken hold of in our thinking. These are words for us today. They would not have been spoken over a hundred years ago to congregations because then people were in a different stage of development, as human beings. We then enter into what is known, liturgically, as ‘The Mystery of Faith’: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. This is quite profound. We hear it differently in the Act of Consecration of the Human Being: the thinking lives in ‘Christ’s suffering and death’, something that has happened, in the past, although we can still think of it in the moment of its happening and the significance thereof. ‘His Resurrection’, this is a thought that should occupy our minds all the time, we live in the experience of that Resurrection. ‘Christ’s Revelation through all ages of the earth to come’ should give rise to a question as to whether we have not already received the fullness of Christ’s Revelation. We have already received the fullness of His Revelation. So, what then is this ‘Revelation through all ages of the earth to come’? We have not yet fully realised the full Revelation of Christ. It has taken us two thousand years to penetrate this Revelation as far as we have it now, and it will take many more thousands of years before we come to terms with the fullness of the Revelation of Christ. It is, and will continue to, unfold in our understanding.
 
On 16 October 1918 Rudolf Steiner shared (GA 182) that the Apostles could only attain a full understanding of the Revelation of Christ about three hundred years after the Resurrection. This means that the Apostles only grasped the full reality of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the Revelation of Christ, once they had crossed the Threshold and were back in the spiritual world. It continued to unfold in them, in their understanding, after they had crossed the Threshold. This tells that the full reality of the Revelation of Christ takes time to dawn for human beings. We can read in the letters written by Paul, who was not part of the Twelve, but was called to be an Apostle, how the Revelation of Christ unfolded for him.
 
One of the fundamental aspects of the Revelation of Christ is that Christ comes in the Gospels as “the revelation of the Father”. Christ comes to reveal the Father: “This is my Beloved Son in whom I shall be fully revealed.” This is why Christ can say to Phillip when he asks, “show us the Father”. “How long have I been with you? If you see me, you have seen the Father.” Christ can say that He has been revealing the relationship to the Father all the time. We realise that even shortly before the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Apostle were still struggling to grasp this Revelation. Even after the Resurrection Thomas cannot imagine what the other Apostles say to him. He cannot grasp what they are saying without being able to experience it himself, because what they are saying exists outside of his realm of comprehension. Christ says, when he appears to Thomas, “Blessed are those, in the future, who will not see and will comprehend.”
 
What is the external evidence for this assertion of Rudolf Steiner? In the fourth century the church develops a Christian theology. The seeds of this theology are in the Gospels and Paul’s letters, but no one had yet figured it out and grasped what it means.
 
There are three extraordinary church fathers, the Cappadocian Fathers, two of whom were blood brothers (and a very capable sister, who turned the home into a monastery), Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa (Bishop of Nyssa) and a friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, Patriarch of Constantinople, who developed our understanding of the Trinity. They said that all three separate Persons of the Trinity are of one Substance. They arrived at this clarity of ideas. Their work develops the final version of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381CE. Rudolf Steiner suggests that these Fathers were able to undertake this work because the Apostles were inspiring them.
 
This understanding of a Trinitarian God transforms our understanding, so that Christianity is not so much a monotheistic religion but a trinitarian religion. It is a religion of understanding the relationships of the Father, Son and Spirit.
 
Where does this live in modern life? The Act of Consecration of the Human Being tells us that it lives in us. Listen to the words spoken from the altar when the crosses are inscribed: “… in us …”.
 
Rudolf Steiner points out that it is now possible for people to live this out. The Trinity is difficult to comprehend. Matthew ends his Gospel with: “Go forth and baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”. Paul also states the Trinity, but how do we comprehend what it means, who these three Persons are, and how they relate to each other. How do they form one Being and yet this one Being expresses in three separate Persons?
 
Rudolf Steiner also points out that for the first part of Christianity, around eight hundred years, Christianity lived in the will: people went out to do, without necessarily fully grasping the intricacies. Then, in Western Christianity, an unfortunate understanding of the separation of soul and spirit arises that denies the connection that individuals can have to the spirit. It ignited a feeling of being at one with the Godhead through a feeling realm. This becomes very evident in the late twelfth century in the person of Fransis of Assisi. He writes to Brother Leo and says: “Preach the Gospel always, sometimes with words”. When Fransis is given permission to form an order by the pope, because the pope has seen Fransis in his dreams holding up the Church as it crumbled, he is asked to write a ‘rule’ for his new order and he replies that the Gospel provides the instruction on how to live, no further rule is necessary. His feeling was that the Gospels were the source for a clarity on how to live. This period can be characterised as Christianity living in the feeling.
 
We have now taken a step where Christianity can begin to live in the thinking. This will continue for a long time. Rudolf Steiner speaks to a confidant, Margarita Voloschin, of St Seraphim of Sarov, an 18th century Orthodox monk who, Rudolf Steiner describes, worked in humankind through the feeling sphere of sympathy. He develops pictures through what he said. Some of his sayings: “Acquire a peaceful spirit and around you thousands will be saved”; “It is necessary that the Holy Spirit enter our heart. Everything good that we do for Christ is given to us by the Holy spirit, but prayer, most of all, which is always available to us”; “A sign of spiritual life is the emersion of a person within himself and the hidden workings within his heart”. This is relevant for us because it leads us to realise that if it doesn’t happen in us, the Kingdom doesn’t happen. Another quote: “True hope seeks the one kingdom of God and is sure that everything necessary for this mortal life will surely be given. A heart cannot have peace until it acquires this hope.” Thus, we can see this period leading up the nineteenth century as a period of experiencing Christianity, and our connection to the Trinity, strongly through our thinking life. Most beautifully we sense that if peace lives in us thousands can live in peace.
 
Now we live in a time where three events have occurred that Rudolf Steiner describes.

When we can connect with, live out of, these extraordinarily deep insights of the Cappadocian Fathers, when we can connect to live in this extraordinary feeling for the other, that we hear in the words of people like Fransis of Assisi and Seraphim of Serov, and we can take into our conscious thinking what we feel and do. We hear it for ten weeks in the Trinity Epistle that prepares us for Michaelmas. We know that we are of one substance with the Father. We know that the true creative power of Christ is in our soul’s creating. We know that when we comprehend how to be a human being, filled with the Spirit, I then know what the Healing God is doing in me. We must take hold of our thinking to comprehend this great mystery: the mystery of the Trinity living in us; the mystery of the power we have been given, that we remain free in that power, but we must take up this power every day anew. Seraphim of Sarov said: “It is necessary that the Holy Spirit enter our heart. Everything good that we do, that we do for Christ, is give us by the Holy Spirit. But prayer, most of all, but prayer, which is always available to us.” If we don’t develop a life of prayer, we will not sustain that which we have made possible. It requires a relationship. We sustain the relationship through what we do, through the feeling we carry, and through the capacity to comprehend.
 
“My thinking live in the life of the Holy Spirit” is how we prepare for Michaelmas. Michaelmas is the season that will allow us to realise the importance of this new thinking, this thinking in the new enlightenment of the Spirit.

This is a picture of the incarnation, particularly the incarnation of Christ into the being of Jesus of Nazareth. From this we can understand something of the incarnating process of the Christ-forces in us.

One can consider that each of the four Gospels has a particular signature, something that makes it necessary to be included in the canon of scripture. We may ask why both Matthew and Mark make it into the canon. They appear to be very similar to each other. Matthew expands what Mark has established and there are elements in Matthew’s Gospel that are not found in any other Gospel. We shall use Matthew’s Gospel to accompany our consideration of the incarnation process.

We begin with an element that is found only in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 2: “And now, when Jesus had been born in Bethlehem in Judea, in the reign of King Herod, see, Maggi from the realms of the East came to Jerusalem and said, ‘Where is the newborn child who is destined to be the king of the people of Judah? We saw his star in the realms of the East and have come to bow down to him.’” In the first chapter of Matthew we have, in a very real sense, the story of the preparation of a human being that can bear the forces of the Christ, and in this star, this heavenly light that appears to the Magi, we have the first sign of the Christ-forces descending. It is the beginning of an incarnating process. This means that the incarnation has a direction: it comes from the heavens and must eventually, completely land on the earth. Matthew, in his Gospel, takes us through this process of the incarnation and the elements that appear.

We begin with the light in the heavens; this shining star, that we can say each one of us has. We each have our own particular heavenly light. We can imagine it as carried by our guardian angel. We can imagine it as the light of our guardian angel, carrying our higher self, so that we have a guiding light, one that guides the process. With this we can imagine the Christ-forces being seen by those who have the power to see them. The Magi are not so much seeing something that can be seen by everyone in the external world of nature, but rather that they can see something that exists in the super-natural world, in the world of spirit. The Magi can see this light manifest.

Matthew begins his Gospel with: “This is the book of how Jesus the Christ became human.” It is an extraordinary statement; surely Jesus was born a human being. It is the process of becoming the human being that we are all destined to become. We could therefore translate this as: “This is the book of how Jesus, bearing the Christ, became fully human.” Because, without the Christ-forces in us, there is no potential for us to reach our destiny; the Spirit Human that we are to be.

Then Matthew provides a genealogy, which tells us what it means to inherit a human body that has been worked on from generation to generation. This is worked on in many ways. We know from epigenetics that what we inherit from our parents is only a potential blueprint. Some of the blueprint will be awakened into life by the world around us. We become the person we are not only through nature, but also through nurture. What surrounds us and works on bringing the blueprint to life is not only the physical environment, it is also the social environment. The ways in which the child is raised determines not only their soul but also their physical nature right down into their physical health. Medical professionals know that a child who shows signs of anxiety will express these in their health, right down into their physiology. Thus, we strive to provide a nurturing environment that enhances all the aspects that can develop well in us. What we inherit is expressed through our environment and may become very prominently expressed in healthy and in unhealthy ways.

Matthew begins with the human being, Jesus, but it is the human being, Jesus, bearing the Christ that will become the future human being. In chapter 2 the Christ-forces are beautifully expressed in the guiding star which guides those who can see it, the Magi, to where the child is: “And after these words from the King they went on their way and behold the star, which they had seen in the realms of the East showed them the way.” In the Greek the literal meaning is the ‘realms of dawning light’. This means the realms of the rising sun, the coming into being, the birth. With the rising sun comes the quality of warmth along with the quality of light. The sunrise provides us with a different quality of warmth than exists before its rising. We have the quality of a guiding light, but it has not yet fully descended, it is shining. It is shining over the child and where the child lives. One can experience it as an embrace that now must find its way and descend.

We are dealing with a quality of warmth and light that the ancient world would have described as the element of Fire. Fire is mentioned before the moment of incarnation. After this description we move to: “In those days John the Baptist came…” He says: “I baptise you with water to lead you to a change of consciousness. He who comes after me is mightier than I, unworthy am I to carry his shoes. He will baptise you the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Something of the one coming after John the Baptist is connected to the Spirit, to fire, to coming to a place that we would describe as an experience of ourselves as the place of the I-organisation, the place of the spiritual fire that is essentially who we are and which must warm, and fill, and transform all the aspects of our being human.

With this comes the baptism of Jesus, and only Matthew records it with these words: John says, “It is I who need to be baptised by you” – John recognises that he needs the baptism of the spirit. John is baptising with water and knows what it does for those he is baptising because he already carries that shift in consciousness. John recognises that Jesus also does not need the change of consciousness of the water baptism. This is the response from Jesus: “Let it be so. It is good thus so that we properly fulfil all that destiny requires.” This establishes the idea that we must undergo the stages of our incarnating experience. This is why, when the child is born, we must recognise that everything is there, but not everything is expressed in the way that it will be. The one thing that has not happened and that only now can begin to happen is this process of inner transformation: the process we can call transubstantiation – the substance of who we are has to change. That isn’t present at birth. It can only start from birth, in our earthly reality. We are not going to be able to transform the substance of earth until we are born on the earth.

Matthew’s Gospel takes us on a journey of how this light, that one can say is in the star, descends and starts to permeate, goes through these processes of Fire and Air, and Water to Earth. This is very strong in Matthew’s Gospel, the process of what it means to fully become an earth being. We can see in little children how they are still caught in the heavenly light. Slowly this light will permeate the child so that it can take hold of and finally, as an adult, not only stand on the earth, but ‘quake’ the earth. We can wake up the earth. The earth will not wake up if human beings do not wake up. Nature is not conscious of itself, but we can be conscious, not only of it but also of ourselves. And that is a bit of an earthquake that happens.

With the words of Jesus, John baptises him and Matthew describes that the heavens open and John saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove. It is the movement of the Spirit that resembles a dove. John hears: “This is my beloved Son, in him I reveal myself completely.” This is a complete revelation of the Father in the Son. And it is ongoing.

What happens when the Spirit becomes present in the man Jesus of Nazareth? He goes into a period of preparation. We, as modern human beings, should take note of this, that it requires time to transition from one experience of life into another. Transitions in life are a process that needs to be undergone, it is not like a switch that takes us from one situation into the next. We must honour this process. Jesus is taken by the Spirit into the loneliness of a desert experience. It is an experience of nurturing warmth, not a cold experience. After 40 days and 40 nights: a period of gestation – the period of 40 is the period of a process through which something can come into reality. One may imagine that the conception of Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth took place in the Jordan and after this period of 40 days and nights the birth of Christ into the person of Jesus of Nazareth takes place. It is at this moment, this moment as of a birth, that something extraordinarily human, filled with Christ-forces, can take place. Jesus can speak and assert Himself. He can discern what the Adversarial forces bring, and He can declare out loud what He stands for and not be swayed.

The Adversary says: “If something of the Divine is truly born in you (if you are the Son of God), let these stones change into bread.” He replies: “The human being does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Our nourishment comes from The Word, it comes from what we can hear and what we can understand. It comes from a relationship. When we are in a relationship we speak with one another. We find ourselves conversing with a newborn baby; we use tone, inflection and carefully chosen words. And there is a response from the baby, even though it is not at the level that a child or adult would give. The newborn recognises from the conversation that it has landed in a place that wants it, welcomes it and wants to know it. This is our first stage of incarnation: a capacity. This is the first thing we wait for in a child, its ability to speak. The capacity to stand and speak for ourselves is huge. It is important in these times to be able to say what we stand for. It is important, when we speak, to speak for what we stand for, not to simply speak in opposition. This is important in this Temptation. It is a confrontation and not a conflict. Jesus stands in front of the Adversarial forces and stands for something. Therefore, it is not necessary for Him to turn the stone to bread. He has another transformation that must occur: His Body is to become the Bread of Life. It is not the external substance of the world that needs to be changed, rather it is the internal substance that needs to be changed.

These are the first two steps of incarnation. The first step is from the light of the star into the body and into the capacity for speech in the human being. And for standing; speaking and standing. The two first elements that make us human.

Now we have to become masters of our world. In Matthew Chapter 8 we hear that the process of incarnation is deepening itself, descending from the heavens into the earthly constitution. One of the signs is when we have mastery of ourselves so that we can manage the chaos of the world around us. “Then He got into the ship, and His disciples followed him. And see, there was a great swell and movement in the sea, so that the ship was quite swamped by the waves. But He slept. Then they came to Him and said: ‘Lord, help! We are perishing.’ He said to them, ‘How full of fear you are, and how weak is your sense of self!’ (The translation is often: ‘how weak is your faith’.) They are not perishing. They are not mastering the conditions around them. The process of feeling fully incarnated into the reality of life is that we can do what He does. He stands up and commands the winds and the sea and there is great calm. Our capacity is to command the circumstances around us because the circumstances around us are usually of our own making. When we are able to master ourselves, we have an ability to do some mastery of the space immediately around us. I can calm this space which is the space around me. “And they said, full of wonder, ‘What kind of Being is this…?’” What kind of being has this level of mastery? In His incarnation He has full mastery of the elements around Him. We have not quite developed to that extent yet, but we have the ability to use the Christ-forces that are within us and do with them what we can to achieve mastery over our inner space to arrive at inner calm and quiet. Christ displays mastery over the air and the water. (Fire, now air and water.)

There is even greater mastery in Matthew chapter 14. This is a capacity that we are working on in our soul-spiritual capacity, which is to walk on the water. “The ship was already many stadia from land and was being beaten by the waters, for the wind was against them.” They are again in the surge of air and water. “In the fourth watch of the night He came to them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw Him walking on the sea they were frightened (Again the disciples experience fear. They are observing something they have not been able to manage in themselves.).” They think they are seeing a phantom, but Jesus says, “Take heart, it is I; have no fear.” John’s Gospel says it more powerfully, “Take heart, I AM, have no fear.” Jesus is not a spirit, He is an embodied spirit, with the full presence of the Christ in Him. “Then Peter says, ‘Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you over the water’. He says, ‘Come!’” It is something Peter can do. He gets out of the boat and walks to Jesus. “But when he felt the wind he became afraid and began to sink, and he cried out: ‘Lord, save me!’ And at once Jesus reached out His hand and drew him near and said, ‘How weak is your heart! Why did you become unsure?’” It is the same thing He said on the previous occasion: Why did you become unsure? Why did you doubt yourself? You had mastery over yourself, so what brought on the doubt that you could not continue, and resulted in fear?

This is the next step in the incarnation of Christ into Jesus: He can stand and declare His position to the Adversary. He has mastery of the elements of wind and water. He can even walk on the water. One can see it as having taken hold of those forces that storm in us and out of us. He can hold the calm and bring everything back to where He is master over it and not subject to it.

Matthew chapter 16: Peter declares that he can see the Christ in Jesus. He can see that He is the one who is anointed. He can declare the Jesus is not John the Baptist, Elijah, or a prophet of old; He is the one, the Christ. After this Matthew and Mark say six days go by while Luke counts the day of the confession and the day of the event and so arrives at eight days going by (an octave). Jesus takes Peter, James and John, “as an intimate group, up on a high mountain. And He was transformed before them. His countenance shone like the sun, and his garments became shining white like light itself.” Here is a radiance that comes. It is a radiance in conversation. They see Moses and Elijah. In the original Greek Moses and Elijah are in a ‘community of conversation’ with Jesus. It is the conversation of the human being. We are structured in a lawful way. We are connected to the law. And we are connected to the inspiration of the prophets, to what they bring. We balance what they bring of structure and form with freedom and aspiration – Moses and Elijah. Jesus needs both the sources – He needs that conversation to radiate out. There is a history here that must be taken into me in order to take hold of something. And they hear again the words that are very similar to what was heard at the Baptism. Now the three disciples hear them. “This is my Son, the Beloved. In Him I have been revealed. Listen to Him.” The power of the Divine is in this human being. What he says will further reveal the Divine. Matthew endeavours to reveal a process from the Baptism, through what happens after the 40 days in the desert, to the mastery of the wind and waves, to the radiance of light. There is something that is becoming ever more real in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We see a mastery of the warming forces, a mastery of the wind and air, a mastery of the water, and a radiance that can now shine, not out there as in the star, but now in the very being of Jesus.

Now we look at the Mystery of Golgotha. The preparation for this happens in the Garden of Gethsemane and reveals something of the incarnating process for each human being. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prays that what is about to happen to him not happen. “If it is possible, let me be spared this cup, yet not my will but Yours be done.” There is an acceptance that we are here to fulfil something, that we are sent into this world. This links back to the words that Jesus said to John the Baptist: “Let it be so. It is good thus so that we properly fulfil all that destiny requires.” There is a plan and a destiny. Yet, we do not have to follow this plan. But if we follow the plan, we incarnate consciously onto the earth. Jesus prays this three times, really anchoring it. Jesus recognises that He is not on earth to indulge His wishes but to fulfil a mission. It is the Divine will He must get hold of. We carry in us an aspect of the Divine will, which is that we develop into the human being of the future, which was the original concept of what a human being is. It is not our will to drive us to that point, it is God’s will. It is not going to happen if we refuse to follow the plan.

It is time that we become ever more aware of what is being asked of us, so that we build ourselves as human beings according to this plan and that we don’t build something that appears human but actually isn’t.

We may wonder why in the Communion of the Act of Consecration of Man (the Human Being) the priests repeat the words three times of taking the bread and the chalice. There is a spiritual reality in saying it three times; it represents something, and the reality is present in a different way. Jesus does not repeat his prayer to the Father three times in the Garden of Gethsemane, each time the words are filled with more and expanded, until they land as a reality. This is the preparation for what will happen at the Crucifixion.

In Matthew 27 we read; “And see, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, and the earth shook and the rocks split, and the tombs opened and many of the dead who had sanctified themselves, arose.” This describes the power of resurrection into the very earthly reality – the earth shook. “And the Roman centurion and his men (100 men) who were keeping watch over Jesus were awestruck when they saw the earthquake and everything that happened, and they said, ‘this really was the Son of God.’” We should read this as taking hold of earth-reality and shaking it; it is a spiritual reality that even the Roman soldiers experienced. Through this we know that something has completely landed in the person of Jesus, having taken hold of every aspect and fibre of His being, right down into the physical body.

Matthew chapter 28: “When the Sabbath was over, in the early morning light of the first day of the week (Sunday), Mary of Magdala and the other Mary came to see the tomb”. If we imagine that up to this point we have lived only the first great week of Creation, then this first day of the week, Sunday, is the beginning of a new week and a new creation. It is the eighth day since the first day of the first Creation.

It is the early morning light, the dawning light from the East. This was the same experience of the Magi when they experienced the star.

“And behold, there was a great earthquake – it is the second earthquake that happens at the moment of realisation that the Resurrection has happened – the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, came and rolled the stone away and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his garment was shining white like snow. – He has the radiance that we know existed for Jesus; the forces of the Divine that were real and apparent at the moment of the Transfiguration. – His presence terrified the guards, – Whenever an angel appears, human beings become overwhelmed, overawed and fearful. Therefore, the first words an angel speaks are, ‘fear not’. – they trembled and fell down as if dead. And the angel said to the women, ‘Have no fear.’”

Whenever some substantial element of the incarnation takes place the people around are fearful. When He calms the sea, when He walks on the water, even at the Transfiguration when the disciples fall to the ground and Jesus goes up to them and touches them and it is only Jesus as they had known him. “’He is not here. He has risen, as He Himself said. Come and see the place where he lay. Now go quickly to his disciples and say to them: He has risen from the dead and will lead you to Galilea where you will behold Him. Behold, that is what I have to say to you.’ Quickly they left the tomb, filled with both fear and joy, and they ran to take the message to the disciples.” The great power of this message is not that He has risen but that He has risen AND He will lead you to Galilea where you will behold Him.

In other words, He will take to you to where you need to be. We are on a journey. The whole idea of incarnating onto the earth is that we have something to do and somewhere to go. We are not here by accident. That is very important. It is an extremely powerful reality. We live in a time when we are subject to certain insinuations, certain suggestions, that we really do not need to incarnate onto the earth properly. That we can escape our responsibilities as human beings; that we can hand them over. An Artificial Intelligence can do it better than we can. Someone else can decide it for us. Someone else can take control instead of us. That we can step back, that we can escape. That we do not have to incarnate. Incarnating is not easy, but it is absolutely necessary, if we are to achieve anything.

The one thing that we have to achieve is becoming the future human being. We can only do that by incarnating onto the earth and working on ourselves so that it is possible that the opening words of Matthew’s Gospel are something we can also say about ourselves: This is the book of how I, bearing the Christ, become ever more a full human being.

The process of incarnation is beautifully captured in Matthew’s Gospel, also in its power of how the elements are transformed: fire, wind, water, earth. The earth quakes at the moment of death with a new power that is released and the earth quakes when the women arrive to realise what is the power of Resurrection. Because of the word ‘and’ it means that it is not just the power of the present moment in which something is resurrected and renews, it is the power of the present moment that takes us, because of the ‘and’, into the future; behold, there is a place to go. The power of Resurrection is not the end of the picture, it is the beginning of the next step.

That is why it is relevant for our time that we feel ourselves forever held in that renewal. Because, if we don’t, we feel that the world is coming to an end. The reality that we must not only comprehend, but live, is that the world is in need of the renewal that takes us on the next step and nothing will happen if it does not happen in us. Incarnation is the way that it happens, the incarnation of the Christ-forces in the human being.

​Report by John-Peter Gernaat

​The theme for this talk comes from the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Michaël began by reading a part of this Prologue from the rendition by John Madsen of the translated by Emil Bock.