Dear Readers,
As subscribers to our newsletter you have received an email with the subject line ‘Portland Branch July 2021 Newsletter.’ However, as usual our newsletter was intended to be on hiatus in July. The piece that you received was put out by an individual out of her own initiative. This person resigned from the Council in the body of the email. It is not a Portland Branch newsletter.
We have since received communications from people who very strongly objected to the piece, and also from those who praised it. This points to the very difficult terrain that many of us find ourselves navigating with regard to encountering one another on the subject of covid.
The Branch Council is well aware that within the Anthroposophical community, locally, nationally, and worldwide there are many different and seemingly opposing individual perspectives on the covid phenomena, the proportionality of the measures taken in response to it, and the motivations behind it. There are a variety of perspectives on our own Council as well, none of us sees it in exactly the same way, nor are we making exactly the same personal choices.
What people have in common is care and concern for their fellow human beings and a desire to do what is most helpful, in freedom.
Our goal as a Council in striving for community health is to bridge differences and enable healthy conversation; and even in the face of great difficulty to cultivate the quality of brotherhood – for which the spiritual Foundation Stone of Love is a necessary resource – that will allow us to work together toward an understanding of the Spiritual World. And inform how we can serve humanity out of this understanding.
Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the last year and a half is the extent to which the differences – completely or largely different paradigms that people are working from – have resulted in separation, divisiveness, and even enmity, and stalled many positive initiatives. In many cases the inability to come together in person has only magnified these tendencies. For many of us that is the real challenge – to win the battle with those forces whose task it is to oppose our healthy growth and development.
With Best Regards, The Portland Branch Council, Christine Badura, Valerie Hope, James Knight, Walter Rice and Jerry Soloway.