Michaelmas Conference

The Festival of Michael as the modern festival of the Spirit: Effort and Grace in the development of our future selves, a workshop facilitated by Rev. Michaël Merle on the weekend of 28-29 September 2024

​Report by John-Peter Gernaat

In The Christian Community we celebrate nine festivals through the year and a tenth period of time that occurs between some festivals known as Trinity. This conference fell on the last Saturday of Trinity before Michaelmas and Sunday was the first Michaelmas Sunday and also, in 2024, it was Michaelmas day. Sunday is the first day of the week as we hear in the Gospel stories: On the first day of the week, the sun having just risen, three women make their way, expecting a large stone blocking the entrance of the tomb they wish to access in order to continue anointing the body of Jesus with spices. They discover that the stone has been rolled away and they encounter a young person. They encounter forces of life and youth in this angelic being dressed in a bright-white robe. The meaning of a bright-white robe is that this being is dressed in light. It is a light being who speaks to them: “The one you seek is not here. See where they laid him. He is not here. He is risen.” This makes it the central celebration of the year – the Mystery of Easter.

In the Orthodox Church Easter is the main celebration and all the other festivals are subordinate to Easter. This is true for all Christians as this festival inaugurates our sense of being Christian: that the Christ is living and is able to arise within the human being and bring about the experience of Resurrection in every human being. We are no longer subject to the one thing that the Adversary can bring to the human being: death. We are a religion of overcoming. We hear it in our Creed where we respond to the Spiritual world with: “In death he became the helper of the souls of the dead who had lost their divine nature. Then He overcame death after three days.” That is the theme: we too, because of the Christ, are able to overcome. He overcame death so that death is not the end for us.

We have nine festivals in the year: three festivals of the Father: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. This is followed by a short period of Trinity time. Then we celebrate three festivals of the Son: Passiontide, Easter and Ascension. Central to these three festivals is the Mystery of Easter – a celebration of forty days. This is followed by ten days of Ascension. Then there is no pause. We move directly from this momentous time of the three festivals of the Son directly into the first festival of the Spirit. We launch into Whitsun or Pentecost. This is a festival of three days: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Up to this point we have been following a chronology. We have been in Chronos time. We start with the preparation for a birth. We go into the birth at Christmas, into the manifestation and appearance that comes with birth and the incarnating presence of the Divine in Jesus of Nazareth. Epiphany: the manifestation, the making visible. We go into the passion, the suffering – the time on earth is a time of suffering. Rudolf Steiner spoke about this element of suffering. What it truly means esoterically, spiritually, the hidden message behind the suffering under Pontius Pilot, as we hear it in the Creed, it is to suffer under the weight of earth existence. We launch from Passiontide into the great Mystery of Easter and suffering is no longer the order of the day. Everything is transformed. What we experience as suffering is not suffering, it is an illusion, if we change our view of it, if we change our effort and action, it changes everything. If everyone can live in the experience of Resurrection it makes a difference for humanity. This is what will be explored in this workshop: what it means for all of humanity to be engaged in an effort that is possible because of grace, what it means to be able to do it because of the Grace of Resurrection, the Gift from God of this divine capacity in the human being that brings us ultimately to our purpose as angelic beings. That is our purpose: to join the great hierarchy of angels; to be part of establishing a fourth hierarchy of angels. In time we will become part of the great manifestation of heavenly activity. Then we go from the Mystery of Resurrection to Ascension. We have spent time in the Ascension Festival exploring what that festival means. Then we move into Whitsun where the Holy Spirit becomes a reality in human existence. Not a reality with human existence, but in human existence, in our inner life. And the Spirit gives birth to the Christ in us. Now we are no longer in Chronos time. In the moment of the Spirit coming we are in Kairos time: the time of the moment.

Now we live always in the moment. Even though we belong to a chronological stream, we live in the moment. It is always possible to live back into the moment of a particular event in our lives. We enter into a new phase of the festivals of the Spirit which are Kairos-time experiences. We lose chronology. The festivals of the Spirit are also spaced out with gaps between each one. In these gaps we rest into Trinity time. After Whitsun we have Trinity time. After St John’s we have Trinity time, the longest period of Trinity time, of ten weeks. Then Michaelmas and a short period of Trinity before we begin the cycle again with Advent. We lose chronological time. After Whitsun we go to St John’s, but St John’s should rightfully fit around Epiphany, certainly before Easter. The message of St John was proclaimed three years before the death and resurrection. We do think about the moment of Jesus stepping into the Jordan River and the Baptism at Epiphany. We do not forget the event in the chronology of events, but we must return to the message of St John to prepare us for the present moment. His great message is metanoia. Then we have the journey of ten weeks, five weeks of which we let the St John’s message really sink into us and we begin the steps of what Michaelmas will bring. If St John brings us metanoia, then Michaelmas brings us the activity of the consciousness soul: the activity for now! We need this because that is where we are today. That is how we conclude our festivals, with this reality, where we have to be active in our consciousness soul reality. We have to do something. The main activity is to be. Our main activity is to be human. Everything we think, say and do is part of our higher, deeper, future humanity. Practicing everything that is not yet a reality but is about to become one. As we make it so, the next moment it lives a little more than it did before: creating the seed.

We are going to look at the festivals of the Spirit: Whitsun, St John’s and Michaelmas, in order to arrive at an understanding of Michaelmas. This is one aspect of the understanding of Michaelmas.

In the Gospels we have two events of Whitsun, two events of the coming of the Holy Spirit. The first is on the day of Resurrection. In the evening the Risen One appears to the Disciples, who have already been sent out which, in terms of the Greek word for being sent, means they are already Apostles. Their sending has not quite yet landed in them. They have locked themselves In the Upper Room and are sitting there, afraid and unsure. They feel a loss and are unaware that they have lost nothing but rather gained everything. They sit in their suffering completely unaware of the reality of the Resurrection. They had heard the messages of the women, but these are unbelievable. Then the Risen One appears. The first thing he says to them is, “Peace”. It is a different peace to anything they have experienced before. It is the peace of Christ. He breathes the Holy Spirit onto them. Only one of the Apostles comprehends this act. It is John. He records it in his Gospel. None of the other Gospel writers comprehended this event. John was the one who consciously understood the Mystery of Golgotha at the foot of the cross. “Son, this is your mother now; Woman, this is your son now”. Now we have a new community, a new relationship now exists for you. John is initiated in this event. The other Apostles did not realise that the Holy Spirit was breathed on them. Fifty days later the other Apostles comprehend it when they hear the mighty wind of the Spirit; they see the flames above the heads of others. They see the other receiving, as the other sees them, receiving the Spirit. It fills them and they immediately go out and they preach. This we also hear in the parable of the young man of Nain: “‘Young man arise’ and immediately he begins to speak”. Language is important and has enormous effect. How we say it is more important than what we say.

There are two experiences of Whitsun: John, the conscious witness of the Mystery of Golgotha experiences the first Whitsun with full consciousness, the rest experience the second Whitsun event in order to be able to come into their own.

Rudolf Steiner writes that it was only John who could write the Book of Revelation because he was the full initiate, therefore he could write a book of initiation. Rudolf Steiner describes The Book of Revelation as the book of how we become initiated to be true Christians, the initiation book for a new Christianity.

We are initiated by the Spirit of God in all ways in which we are brought into a sense of self on the earth in relationship to the other. Rudolf Steiner spoke how in times past the Grail Movement and the Rosicrucians held and kept this Mystery of the initiation of the Holy Spirit, and today it is no longer a mystery, it is an open secret. The aim of the initiation of the Holy Spirit is to enable the Christ to appear as a higher supersensible reality, to that we can actually see the Christ with supersensible vision (not with physical eyes), so that we can meet Christ today in consciousness. We are aware of what we are seeing and what we are hearing and what we are experiencing. We are called to experience Him in full consciousness on the highest level of supersensible knowledge. We are called upon the experience Him in, what Rudolf Steiner calls, our future capacity of Intuition. We can’t practice our future capacity of Intuition if we don’t first practice our future capacity of Imagination and then our future capacity of Inspiration. Our future capacities of Imagination and Inspiration lead us to our future capacity for Intuition.

We then heard the words of our Trinity Epistle in our capacity to comprehend the Spirit. We can only comprehend the Spirit through being human. We can experience the Holy Spirit described as the God that makes us whole or heals us. The Spirit shines in all of creation and when we bring about in ourselves the capacity to behold the Spirit, we can become aware how this aspect of the Trinity shines in creation. The most important aspect of creation is another human being. We can become aware how creation is drenched in the light of the Spirit. When we, then, come to know what it is to experience being human in the light of the Spirit this knowledge becomes knowing for the Holy Spirit. We become aware that the ways of our soul: thinking, feeling and willing, may become filled with the Spirit.

How do we celebrate the three festivals of the Spirit. Whenever we speak of the Festivals of the Spirit it is connected with thinking.

Whitsun is the festival of how of cognitive forces, our forces of thinking, are spiritualised in order to make it possible to tread the modern Christian path of initiation. Rudolf Steiner helped us understand  what the modern path of initiation is: it is to learn to live with the other. This is the most difficult path for modern human beings, we are so fully immersed in our own ‘I’-being. At Whitsun we have the spiritualisation of our thinking forces; this is what we celebrate. This gives us the capacity to comprehend with our thinking what is required from us on the modern path of Christian initiation. The Apostles comprehended it and immediately went out in public and spoke to people they encountered in such a way that the people they spoke to understood them in their own language. The Apostles did not speak in the language of the other people, but rather what they said was fully comprehended by the way in which they spoke. It had to do with the way in which they phrased their expression of being human that was fully comprehended. We should appreciate that we each have our own language that we are able to express in our native tongue, but it is not a language of words as much as a language of tone, intonation, phraseology and expression that is uniquely ours. When someone else speaks to us in this language the words are unnecessary for them to be comprehensible to us. They could be speaking Indonesian or Korean, but we would understand them if they spoke in our language. It is a meeting of souls. This is how we will communicate in the future. This is Whitsun, where our cognitive forces are spiritualised (our thinking) then we will know through our thinking what is the right action, which is to become initiated as a Christian. A true bearer of Christ is one who can see the other.

If we rely on developing our own ‘I’ and do not follow this path of Christian initiation, we could find ourselves in an Adam experience. Adam was a fully contained being. Nothing was missing from him; it was all contained in him. But he could not relate. Once he could see himself represented in Eve (bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh) he could find himself within himself. Adam experiences himself in another independent living person, a mirror in which he sees himself reflected. This path of Christian initiation is one in which we can begin to live into the other and no longer see the other as a vexing, problematic external reality. Then we can begin to form community. We speak these words in our Sacrament of Marriage: that the two have agreed to enter into “community of life”. We can begin to enter into this way of being with another human being when Christ is with us, otherwise we are really poor at accomplishing this. Community of life relies on being concerned for the other in a reciprocal union. Marriage is an example of community of life and is the archetype for the community of life we should aim to build whenever people get together for a meaningful purpose.

St John’s is a spiritualisation of our feeling forces through a new art of human interaction: metanoia – change the way in which you know yourself. This word stems from gnosis, to know. The ancients recognised that when we think, feel and act we can know. It requires all three soul forces to know. Rudolf Steiner reminds us of this ancient wisdom. It is through the art of human relationships that we spiritualise our feeling forces. Metanoia: change your disposition of soul; change in heart and mind and action.

Michaelmas is the spiritualisation of our will forces – the activity of the consciousness soul.

This is why we have these festivals of the Spirit so that we can see this new way of initiation, the new path that leads us to our future self.

Rudolf Steiner speaks of four stages of the development of the human community as a community of the Christ. He says: The future never comes if it is not prepared early. We are preparing the future. The four stages of the future that we are preparing now are:

1. Develop intense interest in the other – true interest. It is the first step of love.
2. To live into the language of the other – literally, into how they communicate. Eurythmy helps us to do this.
3. To witness the other’s life so intensely and spiritually that the effect of the other is absorbed into our breathing: we breathe the other in and out. I continue to live because they breathe me, and they live because I breathe them. It is the breath of the divine. We learn to give the other the breath of life.
4. We must digest each other in the area of willing. Rudolf Steiner says that this is what karma is really about. Karma is the hard to digest stone. When I have digested the other, I have released them from the karmic knot. We are then free in our interactions. In digesting the other we are discerning what it is to be human. This is only possible through the Christ in us that gives us the grace to digest or discern. We ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of All Things too early and lived for a long period with an inability to digest knowledge of what matters. Christ graces the human being with the ability to discern through the incarnation of the ‘I’-constitution into our earthly existence.

These became the activities of this Michaelmas Conference. We achieved this through a study of the four Gospel reading of Michaelmas.

Rudolf Steiner indicated a Gospel reading for Michaelmas and the first Sunday of Michaelmas and recommended choices for the next three Sundays. The reading for Michaelmas Sunday is the parable of the Wedding Feast, Matthew 22: 1-14. Think of the first stage of social development and taking an intense interest in the other, recognising where the other is in themselves. Our response is that the other needs to experience something that is essential for them to experience.

The parable is all about the human being, every aspect lives within every human being. This reading is about the modern path of initiation and taking an interest in the other. It is also about living into the language of the other. When someone is speechless it becomes impossible to live into their language. The aim was to use this parable to determine who lives into the interest of the other. We, as human beings learning to live into the ‘I am’ are living in the “external existence of the ‘I am’” as described in this parable. This parable is about the future when the Kingdom of the Heavens is established on earth. Only those wearing the wedding garment may enter the Kingdom of the Heavens.

One of the other readings is one in which the Archangel Michael is mentioned by name. This is in Revelation 12: 1-12. This reading contains the great images of the Woman clothed in the Sun about to give birth. The Woman is wrapped in the forces of the Christ, she wears these forces as clothing. There is the great image of the dragon. There is a third great image of the war in heaven and that casting out of the great serpent. All the forces of death and destruction that mark the end of the human being are cast out of heaven. In this passage we tried to experience what it means to live into the language in which it is written, it is the language of John who is a great initiate. What is truly being communicated?

In these two exercises we tested the first two stages of the future that we are preparing in the present. The true meaning of these exercises was to develop an interest in the others in our group and to live into their language. We completed the exercise by expressing what we had experienced, in three words. In this we expressed our language.

After lunch we heard what Rudolf Steiner presents as the upper senses. Rudolf Steiner describes the human being as having twelve senses. These senses can be divided up into three groups of four senses: lower, middle and upper. But they can also be divided into two groups of six senses. We then find that the first six senses are reflected in another way in the second, upper, six senses. We will only consider the upper six senses. Steiner ranks the twelve senses. What we find in the first of these upper six senses develops into, and into, and into … something, and it opens up the next sense. Each successive sense develops into, and into, and into and then opens up the next sense. Below the twelve senses are divided into three groups (with dashed lines). We will be looking at what develops in sense number seven that takes us to sense number eight, and what can develop in sense number nine that can take us into sense number ten, and what can develop in sense number eleven that can take up into sense number twelve. We are looking at these upper six senses in this way because we are looking at three sense that are going to develop into future senses, which is what our entire development is about. It is about what we can develop, as Steiner calls them, the future spiritual Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We will discover that our Whitsun festival helps us with Imagination, our St John’s festival with Inspiration and our Michaelmas festival with Intuition. These festivals develop seeds for the future.

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).

Sunday 29 September – Michaelmas Day

The morning began with a contemplation on the Michaelmas Epistle and Michaelmas Embolism (inserted prayer). We have been exploring the theme of effort and grace in this Michaelmas conference: what we do at hand of grace and what grace we receive when we do. This is contained in the Michaelmas Epistle and Prayer. It also establishes our relationship to Michael. Michael is a mighty angel that Rudolf Steiner gave us an insight about, that Michael was an Archangel, but he developed and ascended to the realm of the Archai. Rudolf Steiner indicated that when a human being develops to the point where earthly incarnations are no longer a requirement, the Guardian Angel of this person becomes an Archangel. This is because the development of a human being is not without the intimate input of his Guardian Angel and thus the Guardian Angel has undergone a development in its own right.

Michael is now a Time Spirit and Michael is now the Time Spirit of our time. Michael is a Time Spirit who indicates the path though leading and pointing the way. He is not a Spirit that instructs. He is the Archai that does not tell us, he shows us. Therefore, we must see what he is showing us. Koine Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, has many different words for seeing, because there are many different ways of seeing. There is word that means to gaze. It was initially used for those who gathered at the theatre as they are required to gaze upon the stage. It allowed one to embrace all the action that was occurring in the stage. Theatre at that time was sacred; it was an opportunity to reimagine great events and relationships in relation to the gods, in order to come to deeper understanding. There are other words: to perceive – to see it with your mind, to comprehend it, to grasp it with your thinking. There is also the word: to behold. We are fortunate to have this word in the English language: to hold the being of. We encounter this word in the opening line of the Michaelmas Epistle. The premise is that it is the eyes of our soul that behold. These are the eyes of thinking, feeling and decision making into action. What do they behold? They behold the Great Time Spirit of our time. We behold his countenance. The word ‘countenance’ may loosely be translated as ‘face’, but it really is everything we face when we encounter another being. It is more than the face. It is how the other being presents itself, face-on, with nothing hidden. As human beings we stand fully apparent to the person we face, even though we also have a back-space.

When we perceive Michael, we come to find that Michael has taken on a role on behalf of the Divine that when we perceive him we indeed perceive the Christ. We could say, in terms of our own future development, that Michael has ‘digested’ the Christ and therefore expresses the Christ.

The Michaelmas Epistle also, in the first line, tells us when it is possible to behold with the eyes of our soul as described, it happens in relation to the Act of Consecration of the Human Being, in our inner being.

We learn that Michael began his Archangelic task as a being who served the Father God. When he becomes aware that the Father God sends Christ to the earth, Michael’s attention follows this Sending. He can now demonstrate to us how our focus should be on the Christ. It is though our focus on Christ that we encounter and come into a relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. We hear this also in the Creed in the role of Christ after His Resurrection.

We also encounter the first reference to grace in the second line of the Michaelmas Epistle, that Christ was sent to be the ‘God of the Human Being’. We also learn that the presence of Christ in our lives enables us to experience wholeness.

We hear that Michael stands before the offering and we have to consider what this offering is. We use the substances of bread and wine in remembrance of the offering of Christ, but what we offer at the altar is ourselves. Michael stand before us during the Act of Consecration of the Human Being.

We hear that there are powers that would bind us to the earth of which Michael is free. We do not experience this form of freedom in earthly life where gravity binds us to the earth. But there is a free power in the human heart that the angelic world does not experience, and Michael gathers up this power. This power in human hearts is new in the cosmos and stems for our ability to put thought into action in freedom. The divine worlds have the capacity to evolve through this power in the human being that can be gathered up to heaven.

As the Epistle continues, we learn that Michael is passing on the task to us, the task with which he was engaged in managing the dragon.
But he does not leave us to manage this alone. If we follow his beckoning hand, he will lead us into the true mystery that makes us human, that the deed of Christ works on in us. And then we learn the great purpose of the deed of Christ which will bring light into life. The grace of Christ through the activity of human being will transform life into light.

The Inserted Prayer clarifies the actions that the Epistle asks of us. The power of Christ no longer works from the outside into human beings. Now it works from human beings outwards when we feel the fire of the heart kindled by a longing to be made whole. It is when we live into the very expression of the other where the Christ may be encountered, when we breath in the other and process the being of the other because we behold them, we are made whole because we then are in the other and they in us. We then move closer to the experience that the Father has of experiencing the Son and the Son of the Father, the Son of the Spirit, the Spirit of the Son, the Father of the Spirit and the Spirit of the Father. We then experience ourselves as individuals while simultaneously experiencing ourselves as one with all other beings. Then we become one gathering in which, like Michael, we become the countenance of Christ.

Talk on Sunday by Rev. Michaël Merle: The Festival of Michael as the modern festival of the Spirit: Effort and Grace in the Development of our future selves

​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.