Picture Images

14th November 21

Gospel Reading: Revelations 21: 1-27

Dear Community of Christians,

To evoke such grandiose pictures and to find a glimpse of heart understanding of these images, could leave us feeling helpless.

It could be a real help to cross this abyss of understanding to consider pictures, images of fairy tales. Mostly, the fairy tale images encompass past and future and what happens in between is the struggle to attain the given goal by individuals. Admittedly not everyone who sets out reaches the goal. It is often the arrogance, the presumption, the weakness of will of those failed aspirants, that become stones, insurmountable hurdles that can no longer be overcome.

The fairy tale of “Sleeping Beauty” shows archetypal pictures. In the beginning with the birth of the little girl, the beautiful human soul, the world was whole. The twelve wonderful offerings were nearly fulfilled, when a necessary hurdle to further development, a curse, broke into the whole as confusion, as sleep, as darkness. But there was still the twelfth fairy blessing, and with her word the chance was offered to redeem the work of wholeness.
 
The impenetrable hedge of thorns, which enclosed the ideal world we know as the intellect. This intellect does not allow anything that widens the view of man to what exists behind the hedge of thorns, as a true spiritual world. Only when the time is ripe, the strengthened ego forces have gained the insurmountable courage and the transformed human soul becomes visible in its inexpressible beauty. Then the world can arise anew and transformed.

Perhaps in these archetypal pictures we may catch a glimpse of the New Jerusalem.

Rev. Ute Koenig