by Rev. Reingard Knausenberger
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It was Thomas who stepped forward with clear intent: ‘Let us go and die with him’. The other disciples were fearful and anxious about following Jesus when he announced he was going to Jerusalem to Lazarus, who had died. Thomas witnessed the mighty realisation rise up in Jesus Christ as he was moved to speak it out: I Am the Resurrection and the Life! Then came the command, calling forth Lazarus from the tomb and into a life after a death experience. Lazarus was a deeply changed man after that. What had he experienced? Thomas will have been alert, watching, listening, even questioning. What was dying about? Was it possible to comprehend it? Moreover, Lazarus’ discipleship had led him into this place … is this what following Christ meant?

And then: Let us go and die with him had suddenly taken on an unimaginable reality and scope. The piercing finality of seeing, even feeling, the nailing to the cross, was too much for Thomas. The stark reality of the material world where the end result of everything was death, dissolving, separation, falling apart into nothingness, for Thomas the world crashed into a spiral of unconnected contradictory elements. Where was God? Where had the power gone which held everything together in meaningful relationship and cohesion? Senseless confusion. No hold. Everything estranged.

Then numb emptiness. Descending darkness. Touching the void.

‘The grave is empty. We have seen Him! He lives!’ – not possible! A dead body cannot pull itself together and live again. But what I do know is that he was vulnerable, like all of us, hurt and suffered, bled and died. He was human like me, and the scars of wounds from this earthly life must show. They will be part of his identity.

Now, Thomas allowed himself to feel his body, his aching heart, his vulnerability. I am still here, breathing. But no willpower.

Then the stillness. Staying in that place. Wrestling. Accepting.


Tempted to just let go. Give up. Let myself fall…a-part.

The grave is empty? My soul is empty. Memories arise, fulfilling and joyous, words of comfort. Painful memories, and shame. Welcoming them all. Allowing.

A gentle light enters the darkness with them. A new power, ever so subtle. Very real.

Who was this, who was I? Now, Essential Beingness becomes tangible. It holds itself in itself.

Yet it cannot be held onto. Alive and in motion, in wholeness, allows moments of in-sight.
‘Give your finger, see my hands, … Become trusting!’  Decide to step into motion, into the movement you initiate. Move towards me, then I can come towards you. Just begin. Then life begins, and becoming.

‘God of my Self! Lord of my I!’ You are the power that connects to the Father, the source who holds All in wholeness. You are the might that ignites my inner Self. You are the deepest power, the foundation upon which human nature and the universe builds anew, inside-out.

by Rev. Michaël Merle
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Thomas is not a name as much as it is a description. In Aramaic the word the-o-ma means ‘the twin’. In Greek the twin translates as didymus. Therefore, calling this man Thomas Didymus was to call him ‘The Twin, The Twin’. This reference to him being called twin may be as a result of his having been born a twin but it may mean that he had a connection to a brotherhood, or that he held an intimate friendship amongst the twelve, as close to each as a twin.
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Thomas is best known for not being in the locked Upper Room with the disciples when Christ breathed The Holy Spirit on the disciples. When he is told of their experience he says: “I must rely on my own investigation to confirm that which I can see. I cannot take the word of another to replace what must be for me my experience.” One could say, Thomas was the first scientist in the Goethean tradition.

Rudolf Steiner shares something of significance about Thomas touching Christ. In a lecture given on 8 August 1920, Steiner reverses the order of the senses placing Touch as the fourth sense after Life (well-being), movement and balance. This allows us to view touch as a higher sense that rests upon the movement of our inner soul reflection, and the sense of balance that brings rest to this soul reflection. Steiner describes how the world around us has a reality that gives us the possibility for our inward soul to be permeated with a feeling of God. This is the experience that Thomas has in touching the Risen Christ.

Thomas is the only disciple invited to touch Christ, using his senses to confirm the reality of the experience. We must recall that Christ said to Mary Magdalene in the garden when she met him on the first day after the Resurrection: “Do not touch me”.

In The Christian Community our sense impressions are all focused on the altar; we direct ourselves towards a sense impression of the spiritual world.

Thomas had a relationship to Jesus of Nazareth who was the Christ in a human being. After touching the Risen Christ he comes to a new relationship to the Christ without the physical body of Jesus.

The Christ tells us that there are other paths to the Christ besides the path of Thomas. Thomas’ path is that of a physical sense seeker. It is certainly a valid path for us as modern human beings.

Thomas says, in John’s Gospel: “Let us go with him to our death”. He understands that there must be an initiation process. Our sacraments also call us to cross a threshold, it is also an initiation.

Tradition holds that Thomas went to India. When Christian missionaries came to India from the late fifteenth century they found there already a Christian sacrament and community. The Syro-Malabar rite practices in the Eastern Catholic Major Archiepiscopal Church based in Kerala, India is attributed to Thomas bringing Christianity to India.

reported by John-Peter Gernaat
 
Each year as we progress through the liturgical year the festivals provide a place that we can explore and then move on and return to in the next year with a new perspective to look at them each again. We make a decision as to the intensity with which we enter into each festival. We let go of everything in life so as not to be overwhelmed, and then after the festival we pick our life up where we left off.
 
Ours is the only church that presents a black altar to the congregation for four weeks. We may ask what this means and where it takes us to face this colour for this period of time. By the time we reach Good Friday we can explore what the endings are all about and how a new beginning is possible from these endings.
 
There are important numbers in festivals of the Christ, in the first half of the liturgical year:

• 12 Holy Nights of Christmas
• 7 days of Holy Week
• 10 days of Ascension
• 3 days of Whitsun

 
During the first seven years of a human life the child rebuilds the physical organisation entirely on the blueprint it inherited from its parents. Even the bones are rebuilt as we see with the new teeth that replace the first set. After these seven years the physical organisation is ready to fully ‘land’ on the earth. Then we start building our sensitive bodies so as to develop organs of the soul.
 
Creation is described as a seven-step process.

1. “Let there be light”; a separation of light and dark is created.
2. A separation of waters is created.
3. There is a gathering of waters and vegetation is created on the land.
4. The lights of the Sun and Moon (and the stars) are created.
5. The animals that dwell in the water and in the air are created.
6. The land animals and the human being are created.

 
The elements that are described in this process are:

1. From chaos to form.
2. Order according to measure.
3. One with and apart from.
4. Karma – birth and death become reality.
5. Renewal.
6. Making whole.
7. A seed for the future (“Creation is Good”).

 
This creation is not the very beginning. Something must have been before this. It is like our own first memory. It takes us back to somewhere between the ages of three and five, but there is memory before this, even through we do not remember it. This memory is carried by the parents. Creation is a beginning, but there was a before. It was a development such as the child developing in the womb where we were warmed and moved into existence.
 
In the story in Genesis the human being arises at the end of a process of sorting things until the idea behind all of this, is what appears. That is why it takes time for each of us to ‘land’ in life. The intention was to create a being that carries consciousness of self – “like ourselves” say the hierarchies. The hierarchies will meet someone who is like themselves and yet different. We are in a process that began before Genesis, at which point we landed on the earth and then began the journey through the Old Testament. This journey is the journey of each one of us.
 
When we die the angelic world picks us up and carries us in their ‘womb’ helping us use what we have brought from the incarnation that has ended to prepare us to use it for the future. This journey from the past is what we meet in another human being and what has been invested into each of our destinies.
 
The Old Testament is the development of the human constitution to be able to say “I am”. Moses is clearly told this from the Burning Bush: “I am the I am”, this is who guides this whole journey of development. Christianity has the purpose of developing that power in a human waking condition. It requires resistance to achieve this. The renewed sacraments of the Movement for Religious Renewal give us the map for each phase and condition in life. Through the sacraments we can think and feel; we can feel, think and do. These are the processes that we enter into.
 
In Genesis the blueprint appears and on the seventh day there is a gap between one unfolding and the possibility to rebirth. Every night when we go to sleep we are bathed in these powers that renew us. In the ‘gap’ something new can enter in to renew the impulse. Paul says: “I am, yet not I” providing a space. Paul is there in the fullness of possibility but gives a space for another “I” to be present. The power that renews needs a space; it is what happens in between.
 
The epistle that is heard at the beginning and end of the Act of Consecration of Man at Passiontide is unique. We hear: “My soul lies lamenting on the ground”. We can experience ourselves as being here on earth, on the ground. But we are permitted to be present for God to meet and we can connect with this power that raises us up. We can use our memory of past experiences as a reservoir that we tap into to help lift us up again. These memories do not fade with use but become stronger. We can take charge of this process.
 
One experience of Palm Sunday is of the Christ arriving on an ass. One thread we can identify is that of the archetypal “I”; the recognition that here is a being like us but a completely new version of this being. We are brought into a process that is not of us but of the Elohim and the other Hierarchies, the “I am the I am”. This process leads to the “I am the I am” able to exist in the human constitution. When we read the Gospel of Luke we read that the angels are jubilant, because the vessel had come into reality that can bear the “I am”.
 
At the age of twelve the body receives the qualities that are necessary for the individual “I” to be received.
 

• Me: - my daily personality.
• Myself: - where my ideals are held that are aligned with my higher self.
• I: - the source to which we are connected, which entered into the human constitution at the Baptism in the Jordan.

 
The content of my “I am” is unique, yet we all have “I am”. When a Being says: “I am the I am” the contents of that Being is all of us. Christ holds that creative space and nourishes it. Christianity is taking us into a new experience, it is not a belief.
 
We can look at Christ entering into his creation. At twelve the higher self can enter the physical constitution. At 30, on the path to the Baptism, when the Heavens open the power of the “I am” can land. Christ is the power of the “I am” in this physical organisation, landed as a consciousness in the human being. This is what the people who shout “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday see.
 
When we look at the elongated U on the chasuble of the priest we see events in the life of Jesus that mark the descent to the lowest point. These are the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Feeding of the Five Thousand. These mark places where the “I am” lands in the organisation that is Jesus. Good Friday marks the lowest point.
 
After Easter these points are mirrored on the upward journey. The Baptism which is followed by the meeting of the spirit of contraction that would tempt him to take short cuts. This is mirrored by Whitsun where the “I am” lands in us. Ascension mirrors the Transfiguration when the Risen One now carried the whole of creation. The Last Supper mirrors the Feeding of the Five Thousand in which Christ gives out the bread that nourishes and multiplies. The transubstantiation of Christ becomes the meal at down on the shores of the sea with the disciples. This is why the transubstantiation is always a meal of the rising run.
 
The festivals take us through these significant archetypes.
 
The “I am” is carried to the brink of death and then there is a pause – the Sabbath, Holy Saturday. What is then born is the idea made real, the reality of a new human being, a spiritual-physical body. The entire organisation of the human being held together. This is seeded as an ideal in each human being. The Archetype has seeded itself. We will take the seed of this Earth to the next. The event of Golgotha is the seed for the Jupiter Development of Earth incarnation. Holy week is the week of building the spiritual organs for the Jupiter Development.

​experiences by John-Peter Gernaat
 
Every year Rev. Reingard Knausenberger offers a talk to the parents of the Confirmands and to the congregation as a way of preparing for the Sacrament of Confirmation. In part, this talk prepares those attending for the sequence of events that will unfold the next morning as the child is led into the church for the last time and confirmed into youth.
 
It is also a time where Reingard explains the development of the human being from childhood into youth. She used a lovely phrase: “a youth is a building site, closed for construction”. This is the experience that the parents have, the closing off from everyone as the emotional body and intellectual capacity are tested. In childhood the child learns how to do things in their physical being. In youth the person needs to learn how to do things in their soul being.
 
This year Reingard presented a relationship between the vestments of the priest and the life of the human being. Every year Reingard presents a new image of the value of Confirmation and how this sacrament leads into adult life. Every year I find a new relationship to my own development and gain new insights of what has taken place that suddenly come to light as beacons on my life journey.
 
A lesson Reingard gave to the parents for the youth is that we can do the best we are able right now and we will no longer be in the same place, the next time we encounter the situation it will be different. I feel this is a worthy lesson for adult life as well.

​by John-Peter Gernaat
 
In the conversation Reingard spoke about the meaning of certain aspects of the Act of Consecration of Man and of the importance of the Easter Festival, as well as the significance of the following two festivals of Ascension and Whitsun.
 
This is not a full report of the conversation but rather picking up a few thoughts.
 
At Christmas we read John 21. This is hardly a Christmas story. It is the ‘end of the Gospels’, the last interaction of the disciples with the Risen One before Ascension. Christ speaks to Simon Peter and picks up on his weakness. Peter was the disciple who vowed to never abandon Jesus and yet he fled like all the others after the events of the Garden of Gethsemane, and then denies the Christ three times. The Risen One asks him whether he loves Him. Peter cannot stretch that far, so Christ moves towards Peter and gives him a task in which he can grow closer to the Christ. (It is in activity that we move!) The festival of Easter is the movement from the Crucifixion to this Christmas reading in John 21 over a period of 40 days. It requires 40 days for the seed of the Christ to be planted in the disciples, which frees the Risen One to expand into the further spheres of the Earth and into the Cosmos.
 
On Good Friday the disciples experienced the end of everything that they had worked on with Jesus. It was a devastating experience. Ascension is another experience of emptiness for the disciples, but it is not the same as the Good Friday experience. The 40 days with the Risen One has shown them that there is a continuation. The experience of Whitsun is the opening up of community that enables more to work into the world than can be achieved by the individual. The new creative quality of the Christ happens in between; in the interaction between humans. It is as a spark that brings something new, but like a spark, is experienced and then is gone. It is then that the community of humans can work to bring something new into being.
 
When we remember an event in our lives it gives us new energy, as if we can relive the event again. This is the power of remembering. When we participate in the Act of Consecration of Man we draw energy and power from remembering the deeds of Christ, from the re-membering of the transubstantiation we draw power to become co-creators of what has never been before. When we participate in the Communion we take the experience with us in our thinking where we can work with it to make it a part of the way we work in the world. We change and thereby we co-create a new world that can be the experience of those who come into contact with us.
 
Reingard spoke about the processes that the bread and the charcoal go through. Both are prepared through human activity and both have no use unless they are taken into a further process by us. Bread can nourish only when it is eaten, the charcoal can create the rising smoke of incense only when it burns up. She spoke about the meaning of the ‘silent censing’ of the altar and the cloud that the censing creates and how it relates to the cloud in which we exist that is the cloud into which the Christ rose on Ascension.
 
Reingard spoke about the changes that we can experience in the Act of Consecration. In the first parts we are remembering the past. But in the Transubstantiation three crosses inscribe the act of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the earth, which opens up the path into our future evolution. Rudolf Steiner made it clear, and it is spoken in the Foundation Stone, the events of the turning point of time, the three days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, laid the foundation for the next evolution of Earth that he calls the Jupiter cycle of time. Nothing is certain until it happens. We know this from the spiritual worlds ‘holding their breath’ on Holy Saturday to be able to ‘breath again’ when Christ rose on Easter Sunday. So the future of humanity is not a certainty, but through the Act of Consecration of Man we become co-creators in this future.

A report by john-Peter Gernaat

The report will be uploaded soon. An announcement will go out when the report is online.

​by Eva Knausenberger
 
Have you ever wondered how the woman felt after her face-to-face meeting in the temple with Christ and the people who wanted to stone her to death?
 
I have often wondered why this particular passage is read before Easter. It seems however especially relevant at our time, a time when different opinions about Covid-avoidance, in particular, create an almost war-like atmosphere in and around us, especially when the interpretations of scientific evidence clash with morality in our mind and heart to ask: “What is the truth?”.
 
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. (John 8)
 
The knowledge that: “there is no way out, I have been caught in a compromising position in the eyes of others…” is probably all too familiar to many of us, as well as the feeling that stones are being thrown, which have the weight to kill our ability to live a joyous, fulfilling life. The tempters too are always with/in us, testing us. It occurred to me that I harbour in my own soul the judges, the scribes, the Pharisees, the accusers and stone-throwers and all those that cried: “crucify”. Not a pretty picture, no. Am I sorry that it is so? How much good would it do?
 
So, what about Easter? What did Christ write into the earth? My own interpretation at this time is that He wrote: YES, YOU CAN……
 
I, too, am the adulteress standing in the middle, between the accusers and Christ, -albeit in inner allegiance to Him. It will of course take time for the accusers to leave the inner sanctuary one by one, but we can also find that the biggest stone is then rolled away by a miracle and spiritual resurrection is possible.