Impressions of the conversation with Rev. Reingard Knausenberger on Sunday 18 April

​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.