Dear Community of Christians,
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The imagery of the Gospel is abundantly clear and unambiguous. The invitation to the wedding had to be repeated by the servants several times. It is certainly correct to regard Michael as one of the servants of the king. Yet the invitation was ignored. There was a point where the king lost patience. The consequences of fire and destruction nevertheless culminated in a renewed invitation.

If we translate these images into our time, we are invited to penetrate and to carry out our task in the physical world, with spiritual thinking. Michael’s task is to support the human being in freedom in this activity. And it takes Michaelic courage from us to try to work towards spiritualized thinking.

We can learn to understand that the work of Michael; and the work of the dark powers serve quite polar goals. Both are concerned with the unfolding forces of intelligence of the human being. Both spiritual powers make use of human intelligence that has become free, but with very different purposes.  Michael leaves us free to decide where to direct our will. The other forces push us in their direction because we are still not developed enough to recognize their activities, and they appeal to our egoistic wishes. The challenge we face every day is to find the balance between the real needs in life and our selfish desires.

And with Michaelic power to push back our cold intellectual thinking, we can instead train our thoughts as imaginative-pictorial thinking, as the Gospel teaches us with its many images. That is our everyday purpose.

​“Do not be anxious about tomorrow; let tomorrow take care of itself. It is enough that each day has its own problems.”

Dear Community of Christians,

In our time this sentence about our anxiety and the problems of everyday life offers a constant challenge. Don't we have every reason to worry every day? Our personal freedom, our mental health, our life in community is in danger. This brings us to a crisis point for humanity.

But of course, at the same time, no one can ever rob us of our inner freedom.

We can still try to strengthen our spiritual health with prayer, with the sacraments and with an active interest in art.

And last but not least, in extreme circumstances, we can connect with each other inwardly, spiritually, in such a way that a community is created which no one can destroy.

If we consider both sides of our concerns, the earthly, and the spiritual, we can recognize we are drawn between two poles which constantly demand our full attention.

We are human beings who are living in the here and now and have to carry out this confrontation daily, both externally and internally. We need a clear prudent leader for our everyday decisions. And that can be no one but the master of the house, our I am. But how often is the master not present? How can we then make our decisions without the presence of our I am?

Wherever we want to turn, it is a matter of engaging our ‘I am’ for our concerns, be they earthly or spiritual ones. Only at the level of the active interest of our ‘I’ are we open to the truth and willing to fight for it. This is what it is all about. Certainly, our ego is still very small in relation to the other part of our physical and etheric being. It is vulnerable and hides behind the many excuses that we carry before us.

The dark forces of this world, and also the light ones have an interest in this crisis of humanity. Ultimately, could this be a matter of the further development of man and the world? This potential can only be reached if man becomes a co-worker with the forces of Light.

​For this future destiny it is necessary to develop a strong ‘I am’. An ‘I’ that is courageous, that can recognize the truth, that puts a stop to the adversarial powers; and that understands itself completely as a spiritual being. 

Dear Community of Christians,

The raising of the dead is a challenge to our modern consciousness.

In fact, near-death experiences show us today medicine can do extraordinary things for people who are at the threshold of death. Thereby people have experienced a glimpse of another world than our physical realm.

Without exception people explained this glimpse has changed their whole life regarding the fact of a spiritual world’s existence. Is this the modern way of initiation to a higher consciousness, that overcomes the intellectual thinking, which is bound to the physical world?

Certainly, we can say that the abyss between the world of life and the world of death no longer seems insurmountable. Especially through those who have died and returned through medical intervention and thanks to those who have clairvoyant skills and share them with the world.

Is the revival of the Youth of Nain the old way of initiation, where the master guides the human being to insights in the spiritual world? The death has shocked those around him and especially Christ himself. Or could the death of the Youth be a sign that the wealth of his past lives are no longer sufficient to fulfil his future tasks for the world and Christ recognized it?

No treasure of wisdom gained on earth is lost, that is a spiritual law. But is this wisdom powerful enough to be effective in the future? We know from our own experience that we have acquired certain skills, but sometimes we have to recognize that further insights and impulses have to be added if we want to continue to do justice to our tasks.

How much more must this apply to an individuality that is raised to new life by Christ? We can also see the awakening of the young man of Nain as a sign for the future, also for our time. Our personal intellectual wealth needs a spiritual initiation, spiritual impulses, if we do not want to sink into the darkness of materialism. The successes of materialistic thinking and mechanized medicine, achieved incredible things, but at the same time show us their finite reach, in that the human being is degraded to a machine.

Near-death experiences make possible the reception of new spiritual impulses and such experiences are a gift, not arising from our own efforts. 

Our modern intellectual thinking comes to a threshold of death, but cannot cross over it. The dead intellectual thinking is plagued with doubt, or even denials of anything more.

But by cultivating a living thinking and courageous attitude that includes an awareness of the spiritual world we can prepare to step consciously over the threshold of death. This path of consciously crossing the threshold is a path of modern initiation.

Gospel Reading: Luke 17: 5-37

Dear Community of Christians,
​
The old chronicles at the time of the life of Jesus of Nazareth tells us about how society dealt with lepers:

• not touching them at all and keeping distance,
• Excluding them completely from society
• And leaving them to die.
  
  

People's fear of contracting this disease was all-powerful.

The fear in people today of getting infected with a possibly serious disease is just as powerful. We may well ask ourselves, has nothing really changed in people's consciousness during the last 2,000 years?

Of course a big change has happened.  Trust in the Science of medicine today is all-pervading and based on material substances put into material bodies. And the person is then healed, though sometimes only the symptoms in the foreground.

Healing in the past was based on divine-spiritual power as evidenced by the healings of Christ in the gospels. Certainly, in our time, this healing radiance of the Son of God is no longer present on earth.

And yet, since the events at Golgotha, this healing power of God has been present in every single human being. The difference to the consciousness of the past is our deeply lost power of faith, or even, the lost power of knowledge that this divine strength is a reality in us. This power can first heal our fear. And sometimes it can also heal physical illness today. There are enough examples in our time. A person's whole life can change from the ground up when a real healing has taken place.

The Gospel does not tell us about the further life of the nine healed lepers. But it is emphasized that the faith of the one who gave heart-filled thanks, or perhaps we could also call it conscious trust, has healed him.
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That the healed leper adds his words of thanks to the gift of healing is an offering of soul substance. It is a new, knowledge imbued faith of the consciousness soul that makes the healing finally complete.

Gospel Reading: Luke 10: 1-20/38-42

Dear Community of Christians

This summer people from all over the world visited cities and famous places. It is difficult to imagine how so many people have travelled at this time, spanning the globe.  

At first glance, we could ask, from where did the impulse to travel come from, sometimes so far into the world, and for so many people?

Certainly, each person decided to do this for themselves with different motivations. For example, to explore the beauty of special places in the world, as well as the culture of those different locations. Perhaps, also to look from a distance with a different perspective at our everyday life at home? Or simply to recover their strength for the coming winter through sun, wind and water.

To associate a task with it, or to even think about it, is certainly not the motivation. But perhaps this has to do with our lack of awareness that we have a task, especially when we decide to set out.

In this time, in every encounter all over the world, one has to fear that the other person is afraid of me because of a deadly disease I may carry. Could it be our special task today to let our true humanity shine brightly from within? It doesn’t matter from which perspective my counterpart comes from. A truly human attitude could then become a bridge from being to being.

Our Gospel of today says: “If those who were sent really followed the Lord's advice, then they could report full of joy, ‘even the Demons we have conquered’.”
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As we go into the world, with an ever-expanded awareness that we are emissaries of the Lord, Christ in us, in every human encounter, then perhaps in the future we could free the demons of fear from their excessive influence in our lives and bring them to a certain obedience.