Founding the Bridge The Participatory Path of New Life
Michael Givens The human soul seeks the spirit in remembering what was, sensing what is, and beholding what is to come: In this threefold inner activity, in communion with the cosmic spirit, the soul awakens. Rudolf Steiner prepared the hearts of those around him one hundred years ago—and any listening hearts today—for the new participatory path to the spirit, made openly available by the Christmas Foundation in 1923–24.1 He demonstrated, leading up to his founding deed, that in the past, human beings sought the spirit in the cosmos as a path of remembrance: through rhythmic memory in our wanderings upon the earth; through temporal memory in the temples; and through thinking memory in the founding of academies. Then, this path became merely tradition, left to us as a semblance of cosmic memories, stimulated by the forms of logic and philosophy of the West, or the deeper knowledge of nature found in the East. The participatory path was forged by the Son of Man, the “Nathan Soul,” who had been held back in the spiritual world and who remembered, sensed, and beheld the suffering of humanity.2 Due to his three “pre-earthly” deeds of sacrificial prayer to the Son of God for the healing spirit, we can now stand in remembrance of, sense in listening and speaking, and behold at the threshold of thinking, the human ‘I’ within, united and bestowed with God’s light for free willing. The ‘I’ finds itself through sensing into awareness of the ‘I’ of the other through the veil of materialized physicality. There the ‘I’ finds its karma, in remembrance, in sensing-awareness, and in beholding the spirit. At the Turning Point of Time, the Son of Man, uniting completely with the Son of God and becoming truly human, died and overcame death. He glorified (by becoming the glory of) the Father, who is life, the living foundation of karma and reincarnation, within the veil of death. He became the one remaining way—the
participatory path—through which the healing spirit seeks us in our striving to consciously seek the Mystery of Golgotha; and thus, He became the Lord of Karma.3 The first and greatest commandment, re-sanctified by the life and word of Jesus and by the Mystery of Golgotha, is to love the Father with all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. To love the Father is to love the cross we each bear with our full spiritual-bodily incarnation into the veiled and confused sense-perceptible world, in community. The human ‘I’, through the ego-organization and each soul-spiritual sheath, seeks the spirit right down into the physical where it finds that which unites it with the whole cosmos. The healing spirit floods into our active warmth-enthusiasm for it like the umbilical blood of our mother, and we are truly healthy, truly nourished. Our darkened physical body bears our karma, presents the world (the other) to us, and holds within it the seed of our future, if we seek it. In freedom, we can take up our cross by following the one new commandment of Christ: To love one another amidst evil. The gods’ ancient jealousy of our ability to do this is confounded now by the jealousy of human beings who seek to glorify themselves upon the persecution of God, nature, and humanity through fear, blame, manipulation, and condemnation. Many people today believe they are in a great battle against human bodily illness, suffering, and death; yet they are being led by the blaming Accuser and those seeking to drive the soul and spirit completely from the body for their own egotistical aims.4 They are seeking to make rapid advances in science and medicine by communing with the adversaries to glorify the veil, and not the Father. This is to seek to sever the ‘I’ from human karma and thereby to (in reality) prevent the healing of sickness, which only occurs in free participation with the healing
1 Rudolf Steiner, World History and the Mysteries in the Light of Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2021), GA 233, nine lectures given in Dornach, Dec. 24, 1923–Jan. 1, 1924. 2 Rudolf Steiner, “The Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ”: lecture seven in the series Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha (SteinerBooks, 2006), GA 152, given in Pforzheim on March 7, 1914.
3 Rudolf Steiner, The Mystery of the Trinity (Part 1) (SteinerBooks, 2016), GA 214, lecture four: “The Mystery of Truth,” given in Dornach, July 30, 1922. 4 Rudolf Steiner, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2023), GA 177, lecture five: “Changes in Humanity’s Spiritual Make-Up,” given on October 7, 1917 in Dornach.
24 • being human
