WHITSUNTIDE
Dornach, 23rd May 1915
Man perceives
in himself and in nature both what we call growth and what we
call destruction, or perhaps dissolution. And he
instinctively forms his ideas in such a way that he is
permeated with a certain belief in reality when, whether in
himself or in nature, he perceives building up —
growth: He forms ideas about what in a sense goes outside
reality, loses reality, by directing his glance to
destruction, to dissolution; so that it seems quite natural
to him to describe what thus goes outside reality, when he
perceives it being dissolved, as gradually passing over into
the so-called nothingness of the physical world.
I have often
said that if we want really to arrive at ideas concerning the
spiritual world, we must modify in many respects those ideas
acquired in the physical world. We must have different ideas
from those acquired in the physical world if we wish to enter
at all with our thinking into the spiritual world. It is
especially important that we should form a concept which is
actually found everywhere in our study of spiritual science,
but which we cannot too often bring before our souls —
the concept of a connection during physical life between our
consciousness and the corresponding processes in our physical
organism, We shall never grasp the working of consciousness
in the physical world unless we can connect it with the
concept of destruction or dissolution. Were there only
growth, only development in us as physical beings, we could
never be conscious beings in the physical world. In this
physical world what is represented in growth, in budding and
sprouting, never leads to consciousness. Consciousness can
begin only where the processes of growth are invaded by
destruction, by processes of dissolution. On this basis we
should make ourselves familiar with the ideas which
initiation gives us concerning man's so-called evolution
We know that
at first the child grows into the world as in a kind of
dream. This dream-life of the child is, however, closely
united with his growth, with all the sprouting and budding
processes; and the younger the child whom we consider, the
more do these budding and sprouting processes meet our eye.
Only when the individuality in the human organism gains
sufficient power to oppose the sprouting and budding, and can
bring into them processes of dissolution, does fuller and
more complete consciousness appear. We become conscious to
the extent to which we are capable of pulling down in us what
inner Nature builds up.
When anyone
who has gone through initiation observes how consciousness
arises in man, he finds that every conscious thought that is
grasped, and every conscious feeling that asserts itself, are
bound up with the fact that processes of destruction are
contending with the building-up processes in the organism.
When we look at conscious life we look at destruction; and we
must accustom ourselves to have not merely a positive feeling
for reality wherever we see a process of sprouting, budding,
a process of growth, but we must rise to a feeling for the
conscious life of the spirit by observing what part this
conscious life of spirit plays in the physical world, by
observing, that is, the processes of death and destruction.
It is for this reason that we have to alternate the conscious
processes with the unconscious processes of sleep, so that
what we have destroyed during our waking life of thought may
be built up again by the unconscious forces of nature in our
organism. That is the swing of life's pendulum — that
the soul force when it wakes to consciousness wears out and
destroys what mere nature creates in the human organism; and
that from the moment the soul, in sleep, forsakes the natural
life of the body, from that moment the processes, activities,
of sprouting and budding go forward. Hence it is not correct
to believe that man's waking life is to be compared with life
in summertime, when the earth is budding and sprouting. No!
the earth itself as spiritual being wakes when towards autumn
the dying processes begin, and it is during the winter that
the earth is fully awake. During summer, during the budding
and sprouting processes, we have the sleeping life of the
earth. The Earth-Spirit sleeps during the summer and during
the winter it wakes.
I have
previously pointed out that it is due to spiritual initiation
that the moment of time when man is destined to unite himself
with what in earth-evolution should call up the fullest
waking life — with the Christ Impulse — that this
moment has been placed in the middle of winter, not in the
summer, namely, the Christmas festival. On the other handy I
have also called attention to how in more ancient times, when
manes knowledge proceeded more from his participation in the
sleeping condition of the earth, when his soul had to sink
into the sleeping Earth-soul in order to have Imagination,
the. dream-like Imagination of the old spiritual vision, then
the corresponding festival, the John festival, had to be held
during the heat of summer. This festival might be said to
signify union in dream and ecstasy with the sleeping,
dreaming spirit of the earth. The Christmas festival
signifies a conscious union with the waking Earth-spirit. It
is just through conceptions such as these, my dear friends,
that we come to feel man's renewed connection with the cosmos
We enter into this connection concretely, not by merely
enthusing in a general way about man being a microcosm of the
macrocosm, but by gaining accurate knowledge of how the
mighty Earth-being sleeps and wakes, taking the whole year
for this alternation, whereas man sleeps and wakes in the
course of twenty-four hours.
And now we
must turn our gaze with more precision to what we experience
in the physical world as consciousness. Let us sketch
diagrammatically the sprouting, budding life of our nervous
system (see diagram). Clairvoyance actually sees the
sprouting, budding life, for example, of the nervous system,
especially of the brain, in this form of a fiery wave. Now
the human life of soul is in truth outside this sprouting,
budding life, Were I to draw the human soul-life as it is in
the night, in sleep, I should have to draw it completely
outside this figure; in waking life, however, we must picture
the soul-life as permeating itself with this budding,
sprouting, let us say, fiery life. Thus were the soul-life to
permeate the physical organic life only, no consciousness
would arise, flow does consciousness arise? For that, the
soul must work upon the physical. In the physical to begin
with are budding, sprouting processes of growth which are as
it were distributed over the life of the nerves. It is these
processes of growth that are now broken down and destroyed. A
process arises similar to what takes place when the budding
and sprouting plant gradually withers and decays; thus the
soul life induces processes of destruction in this budding,
sprouting life. The destructive processes I indicate here by
holes in the shading.
When we are
awake, therefore, our soul-life destroys the physical
processes of growths breaks them down. Man as a rule knows
nothing of this destruction. Clairvoyant vision alone
perceives it and makes it possible to say: “Now that
you have put yourself into relation with the spiritual world
(I say expressly with the spiritual not the physical world)
if you wish to have ideas you must destroy something in
you.” What makes initiation such a shattering
experience is that we perceive this destruction, that we know
that If we bring ourselves into relation, let us say, with an
Angel or an Archangel being of the spiritual world and want
to gain some ideas concerning that being, that is, if we want
to perceive the being truly, we must first destroy something
in ourselves.
Not that
anything is actually destroyed by initiation, but through
initiation we become conscious of what is all the time being
destroyed in the everyday process of perception. It is just
the same when we put ourselves in relation with a flower or
an animal, only in the usual course of life we are not aware
of it. We begin to know of it only when these processes of
destruction work back as reflection into the life of the
soul. That is the change. Suppose, for examples you see a red
flower. What you experience in the red flower causes you to
call forth in yourself a process of destruction, You are,
however, unaware of this. But what is destroyed is reflected
into your soul and brings about that you have the red flower
as an idea, as a perception. Thus you must first create in
yourself a copy of the red flower by destroying the sprouting
and budding processes, and while you destroy these you create
what you then see. Conscious life consists in such processes
of destruction, which again are followed by building-up
processes It is an inner working at one's own organism and,
strictly speaking, lies at the root of all works of human
culture. When we instigate cultural work we also destroy
something in nature. We cannot build a house if we do not go
outside to get wood for it by a process of destruction, and
what is thus the product of destruction, torn away from
nature, we build up into our artistic creations. Strictly
speaking, we do this in all works of art. We do just the same
as the destroying, demolishing processes do to the budding,
sprouting, which arrest processes of growth. What is embedded
into the living organism as an inserted element of death
forms the content of conscious being. Every time we display
consciousness we are planting what is dead into what is
alive, and the more conscious we become the more do we insert
a dead man into our living man. Then sleep has the task of
dissolving away these dead elements, all but certain remains
which, persisting as processes throughout the whole of
physical life, lie at the foundation of memory, Were
everything to be dissolved by sleep, we should have no
memory, no recollection. Thus you see if we want to acquire
consciousness we have to recognise in our life a real winter.
Consciousness means spreading the destroying, withering life
of.nter over the budding, sprouting summer life, We have to
make winter within us if we wish to become conscious. Thus we
must in a sense learn to value the winter, because were it
always summer in our life the spirit could not experience the
physical consciously but would remain for ever
unconscious.
Something
more may arise out of these considerations, my dear friends.
A materialistic observer of the world may easily say: It is
not possible to look into the way in which consciousness
works in the physical body. But when through spiritual
science we learn that a parallel exists, in the way referred
to, between the individual life of man and the life of the
Earth-spirit, then we come to the following conclusion - that
if we wish to have a concept of sleeping man and what he
really is, all we need do is to imagine ourselves in the
budding; sprouting life of summer where everything buds and
blossoms. What goes on outside in the earth goes on in
miniature and imperceptibly in manes physical nature. We
should simply experience summer in man when we look at him
asleep, and winter when we look at him awake. If we wish to
know what happens to consciousness when it makes use of the
physical body as instrument, we must observe how in autumn
everything begins to dry up and wither, everything begins to
die away, In the external picture we can make of winter we
have a true idea of what the waking consciousness brings
about in man's physical organism by using it as an
instrument. That is why when the soul is outside the body and
clairvoyant consciousness looks at the body out of which the
soul has departed, it perceives the body as a budding,
sprouting world. It is childish to believe that the
clairvoyant, when outside the body with his soul, sees the
body in the same way as in physical life we see another human
being. We are wrong in thinking that the man lies there with
his soul hovering above and that the soul looks back on the
body and sees the man lying there beneath. That is not so.
The moment the soul goes forth, the body becomes the world, a
summer world; and if the soul remains clairvoyant on
returning to the body, it experiences in itself the personal,
individual winter.
We can thus
discover an inner connection between the life of man and the
life of the earth. When we consider the life of the earth and
look first at summer time, outside us we see in this summer
time what works and weaves in us in the same way but works
and weaves during our sleeping condition. If we now seek to
express in a few words the feeling of this working and
weaving in sleep, we can do so as follows. All this is the
world of coming to birth, of arising, And when we feel
ourselves in this world, we can say, “OUT OF THE DIVINE
WE ARE BORN”. For in so far as with our own forces we
belong to this world, this budding and sprouting world, we
must say: EX DEO NASCIMUR, Out of the Divine we are born. Man
has been able to say EX DEO NASCIMUR at every stage of earth
evolution and will be able to say it also in each future
evolutionary stages
On the other
hand it is essential for our own cycle of time, which follows
the Mystery of Golgotha, that we should now understand that
the forces of dying life work in us; melting forces,
dissolving life, and that with this melting away, this
dissolution of life, consciousness is connected. We find the
consciousness of the earth, the waking earth-life, in the
winter time. In order in winter to live with the earth in the
physical world, we must dive down into what is dying, But
since the Mystery of Golgotha, we do this by taking the
Christ Impulse with us into what is dying: IN CHRISTO
MORIMUR. We make this into a guiding motto through the other
half of the year, when the earth is awake, awake in the dying
life: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.
Thus the
earth's year is divided for us into two halves, into the half
which has its culminating point at Midsummer, for which the
saying holds good: EX DEO NASCIMUR, and the other half which
has its culminating point at Christmas time, for which we
have the saying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.
We should not
think that the correct conception of man as the microcosm of
the macrocosm is merely an abstraction, Nor should we think
that we can do very much if we hold to abstract ideas about
it. Rather should we be clear that we shall meet this
conception more and more on really coming to the true life of
the Spirit of the Earth. You see, when we observe the earth
in winter with its dying, freezing life, this dying, freezing
life is the expression of the thinking, feeling and
perception of the waking Earth-spirit. But we must think of
the Earth-spirit in connection with what surrounds us as our
immediate world. We should picture the world, as it were, as
a great spiritual being having the earth as physical
instrument. And we get this idea of what the earth is
thinking, especially of what it is thinking during winter,
when we consider the whole manner in which the surroundings
of the earth work into the earth. Imagine yourself on a night
in winter, with your gaze directed to the stars, with perhaps
the moon among the stars, and you have to say that the whole
constellation of this starry world is an outward expression,
a picture, of what is thought consciously on the earth, and
we live in it because the cosmos enters into relation with
the earth. You then see how we are standing in a living way
within the thinking of the earth, in all that weaves and
waves around the earth as earthly thinking, just as in
summer, livingly with our own soul, we are within the
earth-sleep;
Nevertheless,
in summer we should take our place consciously in the life of
the earth. We should call on. our astral forces so as not to
succumb to the earth-sleep, Many people very easily fall
asleep in the heat of summer, because during the universal
sleep of the earth their astral forces are not strong enough
to keep them awake. If we ourselves sleep during the summer
time our activity is only equal in value to that of the
earths In winter we should develop in the subconscious the
forces for sleep which withstand the universal earth-life,
whereas for the waking life during winter we need the forces
lying more in the direction of the waking life of the
Earth-spirit. So we might say we swing with our own life,
with the lesser oscillations of our own life, within the
yearly oscillations of the Earth-being, of the conscious
Earth-being. And this conscious Earth-being is completely
dependent on the star constellations There you have a living
impression of the way in which our own soul-life is
interwoven indirectly with the life of the stars in the
sleeping and waking of the earth This gives us a living
picture of what astrology is really meant to be, if it is at
all to be taken seriously. Therefore, as I have often said
Astrology is either the purest dilettantism, or it can only
be striven for as an essential part in the deep study and
knowledge of spiritual science.
Recently I
have often emphasised, my dear Friends, how necessary it is
that those who are drawn to spiritual science should acquire
conceptions that will lead them from what is merely the
content of thought into living reality, Think what entirely
new sides of life open to us when we know that consciousness
is based on a breaking-up, destruction, and that there has to
be destruction for consciousness to have its physical
instruments. For in very truth just as we cannot work in the
physical world without destroying nature, so we cannot become
conscious without the destruction in us of our processes of
growth. Clairvoyance has to look upon these continuous
processes of destruction, it has without bias to see how our
whole life through, a gradual death is taking place for
consciousness to be able to exist. Initiation consists in our
receiving as it were a concentrated picture of this process
of destruction spread out over the whole time between birth
and death. This process is concentrated in actual physical
death; were not physical death to come about, in the
spiritual world after death we should never be able to
develop consciousness. Death, the destruction of the physical
and etheric bodies, is the primary condition for the
development of consciousness in the time between death and a
new birth. As a plant cannot be there if the root is not, so
the consciousness between death and a new birth cannot exist
if it is not rooted in the process of death. As in the first
years of physical existence we have to strive for the
possibility of destroying from the standpoint of the soul the
early processes of budding and growth, consciousness only
awaking to the extent to which we can embed the processes of
destruction into the processes of growth — as only when
the force of the destructive process has reached a certain
stage a consciousness develops — so we have to destroy
and discard the whole body. And the act we thus perform, this
shedding first of the physical and then of the etheric body,
is the starting point for the consciousness between death and
a new birth. We acquire the faculty of consciousness between
death and a new birth by being able to kill ourselves —
we may be allowed to say this, for it corresponds with the
truth — by being able, that is, to undergo the
processes that take place in death. As life here between
birth and death has its starting point in the merely
plant-like life of the child, so the life between death and a
new birth has its starting point in the process of death. We
are here looking at strictly destructive processes, and it is
important that we should adapt ourselves to the possibility
of sharing in the life of the whole course of nature and that
of the entire spiritual cosmos.
If you
examine the modern life of spirit, my dear friends, you will
find that in reality — I have pointed to this before
— the development of man is gradually withdrawing more
and more from the inner process of existence, and only the
external world is considered. There is a growing
disinclination to look at the whole of nature, the tendency
being more and more to consider only half of her — the
growing, budding and sprouting forces. Where annihilation
begins, there existence is thought to cease. The materialist
cannot think otherwise, since he can never form ideas about
spiritual life in the physical world, because these ideas
about spiritual life in the physical world begin just where
the processes of destruction begin. He wants to investigate
only the growing processes for to him they are the sole
reality. When anything begins to wither he sets out to
investigate what grows up over it, or he seeks in the dying
process the chemical remains, that iso the material, the
physical. The important point is that man has no wish to
direct his attention to the other half, to the dying. Yet it
is only from what passes away that men can acquire an insight
into the existence of the conscious soul-life. This is a
vastly important truth — that the modern world-outlook,
because it has developed in the way indicated because it
always directs attention to what is budding and sprouting,
has deprived itself of the power to see the spiritual, the
spiritual only betraying its presence in things when they
begin to disintegrate. As long as there is budding and
sprouting, the spiritual works within the beings, not
appearing as spirit but manifesting externally through
material processes. If the spiritual is to appear in the
beings, processes of destruction must take place. The spirits
of the blossoms, the elementary spirits of the plants, may
not remain when the blossoms open and the flowers are
developed, when the sun with its sounding waves charms forth
the budding, sprouting life. “If it strikes you, you
are deaf.” Read these words at the beginning of Part II
in Goethe's “Faust” with understanding, The
spirits must dive down, They can emerge only when the budding
and sprouting life withdraws.
You see, the
poetic perception of Goethe was so living that he thoroughly
realised how the budding and sprouting that comes forth with
the rising of the sun makes it necessary for the elves to
recede. But this will become clear to us, my dear friends,
that at the sight of the physically dying world there arises
first the misty realm of the spirit and then the whole true
spirit realm. It is not without meaning when in folklore we
hear that to become spiritual the trees must first decay,
that only when they are decaying do they let us see the
spirit. If we go out into the country and see a decaying,
dried-up tree-trunk, it is really showing for the first time
its spiritual appearance. There must everywhere first be
destruction before the spiritual is to appear.
Modern
spiritual life, it is true, consists just in this —
that souls have withdrawn from such an intimate living
together with nature that they are able to feel the decaying
forces and in them all that is spiritually alive. Hence it is
that today when we speak of the spiritual, people can form no
conception of it at all, for they only consider the world in
so far as it buds and sprouts. When it ceases to do this,
when decay sets in, for them it leaves the field of reality.
If you speak to them of the realm of true life, if you say
that the spiritual rises out of the dying, if you tell them
all this, you will find that they are listening to something
that has absolutely no meaning for them. It may actually
happen that if you are speaking today to a gathering of
people who have had no previous preparation through spiritual
science and you talk of the spiritual living in the world,
they have no notion of what is in question. To such people
world-conceptions are a matter of complete indifference, They
take no interest in discovering; what may be found at the
basis of things:. One can have the same kind of experience
that we once had at a lecture. You know that we try as far as
possible to keep away those who are generally the least
cultured of those attending our lectures, those who write for
the newspapers. As a rule they understand the minimum of what
is spoken about, But sometimes it happens that these very
clever people of the present day cannot be kept away. One
cannot always act in such a drastic way as was done recently
at a certain place in Austria when a reporter came to the
lecture and our chairman said to him: “You will
certainly not understand anything and had better stay
away.” The man had actually bought a ticket. It can't
always happen like that, It happened on another occasion that
a reporter wrote: “What is this spiritual science meant
to be? It is obvious that one person pictures the world in
one way and another somehow else, Everyone has a right to his
opinion.” Thus in our time you find all over the place
complete lack of interest mixed with utter frivolity whenever
a world-conception is in question. And this was once written
about a lecture: “One person sees the world as a box of
bricks, another makes a brew of toads gall with tiger's
intestines, a third is a monist, a fourth stares at the
confusion without thinking at all, a fifth looks through two
pairs of spectacles at the forces of the soul and so (says
the writer) we could go on indefinitely.” He is
completely indifferent to all these points of view.
This lack of
interest towards a spiritual comprehension of the world is
not diminishing, it is increasing, and will go on doing so
unless a deepening comes about in the world through spiritual
science, Deepening through spiritual science will prove of
the greatest value, my dear friends, because it does not
merely call upon man's faculty for forming concepts and
ideas, but seizes upon his whole soul and permeates it so
that he actually feels himself as microcosm in the macrocosm,
and really experiences individually what has first to build
itself up on the processes of destruction. We can attain an
actual living-together-with-the-dead only when we can see in
the destructive process of death a process that makes a
foundation upon which the spiritual being of man rises after
death — a process continuing to work up to the time of
a new birth.
Thus
spiritual science must mean both familiarizing ourselves with
the truth of things and letting the truth of things take hold
of our very being. Modern spiritual life is a withdrawal from
the truth, a becoming apathetic It is becoming a matter of
indifference whether there is real clairvoyant vision or
whether “toads' gall is brewed with tiger's
intestines”. In its culture and ethics modern spiritual
life is on the way to the most frivolous and cynical
indifference towards all existence that has to do with the
depths of being, On the other hand, spiritual science is
developing and can develop in a natural way, since the human
soul, simply by interesting itself in the results of
spiritual investigation, is taken hold of by the cosmic
process, carried into it, interwoven with it. It is not
necessary to be clairvoyant, but only to enter honestly into
the experiences resulting from clairvoyance, getting to know
spiritual science; then one will be laid hold of and carried
along by what is received through anthroposophical concepts
into a living mutual experience and mutual feeling with the
cosmos, For this it is certainly necessary that spiritual
science should not be looked upon as something adding to the
enjoyment of life, but again and again we must penetrate
further with our thought into what spiritual science gives.
We need not be clairvoyant at first but must accustom
ourselves to consider the things of life from many aspects,
in the sense of spiritual science. Hence among us things are
described from the most varied aspects. Then the experiences
take hold of one and carry the soul in feeling if not with
knowledge right into the life of the spiritual world, into
the spiritual manifesting in the material.
But now my
dear friends, in what spiritual science wishes to bring about
in knowledge, in art, in religious feeling, and in ethical
will — spiritual science takes its place in our
spiritual life as something of which we have to be conscious
that it is a new element in modern culture. Any
anthroposophist must become conscious of this new thing.
Yesterday I pointed this out in another connection —
namely, that it is necessary for us to give a new form to the
Christ Impulse, that our figure of the Christ is essentially
different in form from that of Michelangelo's . Our thinking
and feeling have to be thoroughly transformed in face of the
new standpoint. Then men will begin to have an inkling of
what life is as a whole — intensive, living life, For
this has ceased. Wherever we look in our environment there is
no longer the feeling Goethe expressed when he said:
“Art must be the expression, the true expression, of
living cosmic laws.” Art has to be an interpretation of
the mysterious laws of nature. Today there is no longer any
understanding for that. Hence one sees that in all spheres
there is a gradual falling away from the real inner life of
truth, in what appears as knowledge on the one hand, and on
the other as art. In art today we are fond of speaking of
compositions, of juxtapositions of individual parts. What art
was in olden times, what it must again become — a
creating out of the truth of the things themselves —
has vanished. In the fullest sense there is an ahrimanic
conspiracy against truth, which is spread abroad in the
world, and this appears today in the sphere of art as well as
in that of science. In the sphere of science we see everywhere
a clinging to what is merely perceived by the senses.
In art, too,
we see what resembles this. We see, in man, the possibility
of feeling and perceiving the inner truth of things gradually
dying out. Thus works of art can be produced and admired
throughout the civilised world like “Jean
Christophe”, the novel by Romain Rolland.
Anyone who
creates out of true art, who feels inner truth, inner ruling
truth, will never jumble together such a “work of
art” as “Jean Christophe”; he would know
that the individuality of a Beethoven, Richard Wagner,
Strauss, Gustav Mahler, has its inner truth for each one of
them. If we jumble them all together, we produce a vexatious
chaos of decadent art like this tiresome “Jean
Christophe”, which, however, to the regret of all
concerned with real art, is admired throughout the civilised
world. It is admired, let me say, because today there is a
secret conspiracy against the real, essential truth. Indeed,
people are no longer aware that they are sinning against the
real, essential truth in admiring this so-called literary
work and in letting pass as valid not the living
individualities built up from a unity that is alive, but a
chaotic, foolish work that is all patched together.
We must, my
dear friends, be alive to the various sources of perversion
out of which the soul willingly creates at the present time;
we must calmly and courageously acknowledge what is thus
perverted so as to bring to consciousness the significance of
the impulse of spiritual science and its intervention in
man's living world of truth. Then we shall understand. that
we live in an age in which we must be clear that what
confronts us as summer-life, budding, sprouting life, is EX
DEO NASCIMUR; diminishing life, the destroying of the
soul-life, but spirit issuing forth from this destruction in
our life since the Mystery of Golgotha — IN CHRISTO
MORIMUR. But in the future men must not remain standing on
this ground; when this budding, sprouting life of summer when
comes, when the Earth-spirit sleeps, we must find the strength
to develop and carry into the sleep of the Earth-spirit a
higher force arising from the life of soul resulting from
clairvoyant knowledge. Then we have to say: As the world in
summer is EX DEO NASCIMUR, so the world in winter; and since
the Mystery of Golgotha, is IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.
But as we go
to meet the sleep, the summer life, the sleep of the external
organism of the earth, let us be conscious that we can carry
into this time what we now experience out of this actual
living together with the spiritual world, what the spirit
carries into this time of the earth's sleep — the mood
of Whitsuntide. If we have felt: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR aright,
we shall bear the Whitsun mood into this sleep-condition of
the earth by receiving the impulse spiritual science is able
to give.
We are born
out of the Divine; the summer life of budding, sprouting
nature is witness to this We live with the Christ, and feel
that we do, by living ourselves into the winter; when the
earth wakes we take the Christ Impulse with us into the life
of dying Nature: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR, But by going forward
again to meet the summer with the Mystery of Golgotha, we
carry the Whitsun mood into life so that it may awake in the
darkness of summer, in the budding and sprouting and that
amidst the sleeping Earth-spirits we ourselves awake in
spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.
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