Preparing for Michaelmas

​Preparing for Michaelmas - a talk by Rev Michaël Merle given on Sunday 15 September

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

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.

​He speaks of us coming into the Consciousness Soul Age in the early fifteenth century – a time where we become conscious of our own working. He speaks of it arriving at a point in history, and we cannot, for example, find any evidence before this time given by Rudolf Steiner, of a self-portrait by an artist. The ability to become conscious enough of the self to capture it as the subject of a portrait comes with the dawn of the Consciousness Soul Age. However, it takes a good five hundred years for us to begin asserting more consciously what it means for us to live in this time of the Consciousness Soul.
 
Rudolf Steiner speaks of us coming into the time of Michael as the guiding Time Spirit at the end of the nineteenth century.
 
He speaks of the history of humanity coming out of a dark period, a period of Kali Yuga (as it was first understood by the Ancient Indian epoch) a time when human beings struggle to find something out of their own effort. This describes a period of spiritual darkness, a winter period. We came out of this period at the end of the nineteenth century and entered the twentieth century into a new spring. We exit the darkness without grasping the light and this unfolds in the complicated events of the early twentieth century, wars that engulfed almost everyone on the planet. In all this time there is a growing question in human beings: how do I develop my connection to the spirit, not through an institution, but by my effort? Then, by my connection, I can join or form a community with other who find this connection. We are coming into a new sense of ourselves. 

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.