CONTEMPLATION FOR EASTER SUNDAY

Eurythmy, the Dance of the Living Word

Take time to lovingly picture the living imaginations of this Easter story. 
            In the Beginning, was the Creative World-Word. The Word spoke all of existence into being, and the world was born. In speaking the Word, God turned himself “inside-out.”
            In the beginning, the Word was movement, was song, was meaning. The Word was dance.
            Or, as Rudolf Steiner says, the “God did eurythmy and the world came into being.”
            Humanity was born into the “dancing world.” In the early ages of the, when all was life and movement, we were swept up into the dance of the universe.
            Our movements were in harmony with the movements of the Word.
            The temple of our body was shaped by the Word, and revealed an etheric living picture of the universe that it lived in.   
            Our minds did not think analytically, but responded to the world around it with a consciousness of living pictures.        
            And in this mind, we were dreaming the great dream of existence.
 
            When the human being chose to “fall into matter,” beginning our journey towards cosmic independence and freedom, the Word “fell into matter” with us.
            Time slowed down. The matrix of space crystallized. We became able to see everything in great detail. Like children who had left their parents’ home, we set out to find ourselves. But we lost the view of the Creator.
            And so it was that the Creator chose to enter right into the heart of the matrix of time and space that we live in.
            Becoming small, Creator turned himself “outside-in.”
           
            The Word became Human, and dwelt among us.
            And the Word was able to keep speaking, keep creating, even in the imprisonment of the body. Even in the imprisonment of Death.
 
            On Easter morning, the tomb of the Word was empty.
            Those soldiers guarding the tomb asked “Why do you seek the Living among the Dead?”
            And Mary, the archetypal soul who came to the tomb in the early morning hours, “turned herself around,” shifting her awareness from the earth level to spirit perception.
            She saw the Risen Word there in the guise of a gardener, one who tends to the life forces of the earth.

“He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird.”

            The Risen Word is with us everywhere. Wherever we practice living thinking, we can see the etheric world around us. We can see the Word speaking through the etheric forms of all of nature. We can dis-enchant the enchanted World-Word with our gaze.
            And through eurythmy we can dance once again with the World-Word. For eurythmy gives us a direct experience of the living forms and forces that stem from the Word, the living shapes that created us in our etheric form.
            These have been re-enlivened, rescued in the etheric world by the deed of resurrection.
            Eurythmy is the dance of the risen, living World-Word. I am forever grateful for this living etheric art, which brings health and healing to so many human beings.