Read slowly, and allow the words to come alive within you.

Saturday of Holy Week

I have heard a beautiful story from Rudolf Steiner.

“Imagine,” he says, “that you were looking at the Earth from the far distances of space.
Imagine that you had been doing this for long long ages of time.
For, he says, there came one moment when you could see something astonishing.
Suddenly, the earth began to glow. To shine. To radiate light out into space.
The light that it sent out was no reflected light, such as the moon sends sunlight back into space.
This light came from within the earth itself, when the blood of Christ flowed into the Earth.
This,” he says, “is what happened on Good Friday.”

 
        Through his sacrificial death, Christ offered Holy Communion to the earth.
        The soul of Christ then entered with His body and blood deep into the earth.

        How was the death of Christ different from other deaths? Christ’s being did not rise away from the earth and dissolve into the expanses of the spiritual world. Christ continued to contract His being upon death. His work was to permeate every layer of this created world with the seed forces of vital creative life, to wrest it from death and bestow upon it the forces of continued future existence.
          Even as it was dark on the earth, as the earthquakes still rumbled and madness permeated the city, the sun-seed in the earth began to shine. Spirit light was born in the core of the earth.

       We human beings were created to be citizens of both worlds: of the heaven and of the earth. Or perhaps to say it better: when we were created, both worlds were still one. But as the earth-world became more solid and as we human beings became more enmeshed in it, the spiritual world faced the very real danger of losing the human race to materialism.
        When they die, human beings who have not cultivated a relationship to the spiritual world while on the earth face the very real danger of not being able to find their way in the land of spirit. They face the danger of dying not only in body, but also in consciousness.
         Our consciousness has relevance not only for ourselves, but also for the spiritual world. Dead thoughts rely heavily on material processes and the brain, but living thinking can access the spiritual world. Living thinking can build the bridge to the spirit even while we are living on earth.
        Yet, the more people turn away from the spirit, the less they can access higher world and the fewer the forces of spirit rejuvenation the earth has access to. This sets the stage for a continuing cycle of cosmic-earthly devolution.
        Christ, the creating spirit of both worlds, bridges spirit and matter. With the force of a spiritual sun, his gift of light, love and life to the world returns life forces to the earth, and shines in the spiritual world for all people, whether living in body or not.

     Each individual must find his or her way to the seed forces of the I-AM alone. The awakening must occur from within, in freedom. The I-AM is not a thing. It is a verb, an activity of presence-ing. of being consciousness. An active I-AM resurrects at every moment,  out of the state of death that we live in even when alive. The I-Am is a living seed, planted in the human heart. It will sprout, grow and flower in the soil of love.

            It is said that the new Sunrise of Easter already occurred deep in the center of the earth on Holy Saturday. There the new day dawned for those human souls who had previously not been able to find their way back to spirit.
            The death of matter has been overcome. The resurrection of the human race in the realm of the etheric forces has begun.
             Can we awaken in ourselves the capacity for love and living consciousness? Can we grasp what really happened on Easter? Can we be part of the new future?