One Word
Silence. through tumult through ecstasy cutting, throwing, crying out – Hosanna! His only word: Woe. - Tom Ravetz, Palm Sunday, 29 March
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The new issue of Perspectives has just come out.
Editorial – Co-creators of the new reality
Having been asked to write an introduction to a new edition of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on The Fifth Gospel, I was struck again by their urgency. Far from mounting a challenge to the four evangelists or to church orthodoxy, these lectures insist that the events of the first century are not ‘past’: they reverberate into our present and demand something of us now. Steiner argued that Christianity could no longer rest on unconscious devotion: a ‘gospel of knowledge’ was required. Since the fifteenth century, human consciousness has turned inward, developing a sharp self-awareness and a critical questioning. Faith must now mature into conscious understanding or risk hardening into empty tradition.
At the heart of these lectures stands the ‘Reversed Lord’s Prayer,’ which bears witness to a profound human desolation. Where ‘daily bread’ should nourish, there is crushing debt; where heaven’s will should guide, there is encroaching darkness. The cry that sounds through this reversal resonates with our own experience of estrangement from meaning. A world once sensed as transparent to spirit now appears ruled only by mechanism and chance. This diagnosis of abandonment marks the end of a world that was given to us, the world that reductionist science knows, governed by entropy and apparently devoid of spirit. Yet paradoxically, this exposed and forsaken condition becomes the necessary ground for the answer.
At the threshold of every Act of Consecration of Man we pray that we may fulfill the Act worthily: no longer mere spectators of a given reality, we are called to become co-creators of one that is still emerging. In an age of critical questioning, the bridge between these two states is the power of the word. The physical world provides the raw material of our lives, often felt as a place of spiritual drought, but our inner participation can supply the meaning that can make that world whole. The divine world does not impose itself upon us; it stands before us as a dormant potential, waiting to be fulfilled through us. When we align all the powers of our soul, cognitive, affective and volitional with the service, we are drawn into a sacramental act of cognition. In such moments, the future becomes an experience, if only in fleeting flashes, and the world and the Word begin to meet again.
Friedrich Rittelmeyer, first leader of our movement, attended some of the lectures on the Fifth Gospel. He warned that Steiner’s gifts could all too easily harden into dogma – the very fate these lectures exist to prevent. That warning has not aged. What Steiner asks of us is not belief but transformation: that inherited faith might become active knowing, and that we take our place not as heirs of a finished revelation but as participants in one that is still unfolding.
-Tom Ravetz
The new edition of The Fifth Gospel will be published by Rudolf Steiner Press this spring. https://www.rudolfsteinerpress.com/
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