April Newsletter/Calendar 2022

The library is open 10 am-8pm every Saturday For more information or an appointment contact librarian Lisa Jones, lmjones1075@protonmail.com

In this Issue:

• Save the Dates

• Branch Easter Season Observance

• Reintegrating in Community After Separation and Crisis, with Orland Bishop

• Portland Branch Easter Season Observance & Potluck

• Portland Branch AGM

• Spirit Triumphant! For Easter

• Michaela Glockler: Where Are We Now in the Corona-pandemic?

• New Class: The Tarot in Light of Spiritual Science

• Update on matching funds for $4,000 rent grant

• Calendar, Events/Ongoing Groups

• Events Fliers

• Embryo DVD’s Available

• Advertisers/Sponsors

• Members/Donors

Save the Dates (more details in the Fliers, Articles & Calendar below)

• Branch Easter Season Observance and Potluck on Palm Sunday, April 10

• Anthroposophy in Everyday Life with Cheri Munske, Mondays

• Micha-el Institute Spring Conference, ‘The Spiritual Nature of Our Time, April 8-10

• Drawing Forms from the First Goetheanum with Patrick Marooney May 13, 14

• Reintegrating in Community After Separation and Crisis, with Orland Bishop June 3-4-5 (Whitsun)

• Portland Branch Annual Gathering and Potluck June 25, 3-5 pm

• Micha-el Institute Teacher Training, Summer Conferences and Intensives, June-August

Easter Season Observance

Palm Sunday, April 10, 3-5 pm, Potluck at 5 pm

Location: Branch Library/Community Space

Easter, or Three Crosses Rudolf Steiner, April 1924

We can notice that the crosses are small, seen only from a distance, and that Steiner is not focusing on Good Friday, but on the Christ’s descent into hell to raise the dead. A theme not so much focused on suffering as on the germinating theme of resurrection, as pointed out by Angela Lord in her book on the painting.

Together we will examine a chapter from the book The Christian Year titled simply, The Cross, with a special focus on the seven sayings of Christ from the cross. and tie it in with an exercise from How to Know Higher Worlds.

We look forward to breaking bread together afterward, as we always look forward to our wonderful potlucks.

Together and separately, we are striving for how to be in community in this age of intense individuation - and for some - increasing isolation. Can we understand separation, and crisis, as part of the initiation process? A process that could be completed with community integration? Can we build a capacity for the highest good to manifest through our care and connection to each other and to those who are co-creating the future with us? What does it mean when community is struggling to support integration? And how do we move toward healing and health?

Orland Bishop will be with us on Whitsun weekend to help us address these great challenges of our times. He asks that we bring our own experiences to share, and together we will build a sacred space to host a healthier future for us all.

Look for more information and an opportunity to register soon.

Orland Bishop is the founder and director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, where he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge. ShadeTree serves as an intentional community of mentors, elders, teachers, artists, healers, and advocates for the healthy development of children and youth. Orland’s work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa.

He Is Not Here He is Risen, Ninetta Sombart

Spirit Triumphant

Rudolf Steiner, Dornach March 27, 1921

Rudolf Steiner speaks of the Christmas and Easter Festivals as being the two great pillars of the year – Christmas pointing to birth, when our eternal being comes into the material world – and Easter pointing not to death but to resurrection, the triumphant victory, overcoming of death. With this Easter thought “we can come to realize that the immortal, spiritual, supersensible essence of the human being that cannot in the real sense be born, descends from spiritual worlds and is clothed in the human physical body.”

This wisdom was “submerged by the materialism of the West”, which focused on Good Friday, a “picture of Christ Jesus as the Crucified One, the Man of Sorrows, brought to his death by the indescribable suffering that was his lot.” This representation “simply was not a part of Christianity in its original form.”

The picture of Christ agonizing and dying on the Cross meant that he could no longer be comprehended in His full spiritual nature Who guards and sustains humankind. And the Good Friday festival and the Easter festival of Resurrection were largely combined. The true Easter thought was lost – the thought that the living spirit must always be victorious over everything that can befall the physical body. (emph. added) Rudolf Steiner speaks of ‘spiritual reality expelled by the crucifix’, in much the same way that in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, belief in the human spirit was declared to be heretical.

The holy Mystery of Birth, the Christmas Mystery once revealed in such glory, gradually deteriorated in the course of Western civilization into those sentimentalities which reveled in hymns and songs about the Jesus Babe and were in truth merely the corresponding pole of the increasing materialism… obscuring men's feeling of the stupendous Christmas Mystery of the coming of a super-earthly Spirit… True, the Resurrection thought has remained, but it is associated always with the thought of Death…. In an age when it is incumbent upon man to experience the resurrection of his own being in the Spirit, particular emphasis must be laid upon the Easter thought… Christ as a super-sensible, super-earthly Being Who entered nevertheless into the stream of earthly evolution — that is the Sun-thought to the attainment of which all the forces of human thinking must be applied.

This is what the Easter thought must call up in us to-day. Easter must become an inner festival, a festival in which we celebrate in ourselves the victory of the Spirit over the body. As history cannot be disregarded, we shall not ignore the figure of the pain-stricken Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, on the Cross; but above the Cross we must behold the Victor Who remains unaffected by birth as well as by death, and Who alone can lead our vision up to the eternal pastures of life in the Spirit. Only so shall we draw near again to the true Being of Christ. Western humanity has drawn Christ down to its own level, drawn Him down as the helpless Child, and as one associated pre-eminently with suffering and death.

But we need the Christ for Whom we can seek in our inmost being, because when we truly seek Him, He at once appears. We need the Christ Who draws into our will, warming, kindling, strengthening it for deeds demanded of us for the sake of human evolution… Goethe has made it abundantly clear that the figure of the crucified Redeemer does not express what he feels to be the essence of Christianity, namely, the lifting of man to the Spirit.

In his own eternal being man must unite with the Christ Who came into the world and cannot die, Who when He beholds the Man of Sorrows on the Cross, is looking down, not upon the eternal Self, but upon Himself incarnate in another. … How is man to acquire the power to grasp this Pentecost thought if he is incapable of apprehending the true Easter thought — the Resurrection of the Spirit? The picture of the dying, pain-racked Redeemer must not confound him; he must learn that pain is inseparable from material existence.

(For initiates in the ancient mystery schools) The contemplation of suffering was intended to indicate the resurrection of the spiritual nature. It was sought to place before men in the most profound sense what may be expressed in the following simple words — Thou hast to thank many things in life for thy happiness, but if thou hast acquired knowledge — gained insight into spiritual connections, thou hast to thank suffering for these. Thou must be thankful that thou hast not succumbed to sorrow and suffering, but hast had the power to rise above them.

However beautifully, however splendidly Art has represented the crucifixion, it alone must not rise before our souls with the thought of Easter, but the thought must rise: “He Whom thou seekest is not here.” Beyond the cross He must appear, He Who is here now, He Who speaks to us from the Spirit, in order to awaken the spirit in us

Therefore we must seek that which is here. At Easter we must learn to turn to the Spirit, and the picture of the resurrection is alone able to present this to us. Only with it before us can we pass in the right way from the sorrow-filled atmosphere of Good Friday to the joyful atmosphere of Easter Day. In it we will be able to find what we have to grasp with our wills in order that we may become active in changing the downward tending forces of humanity into upward tending forces. We are in need of forces capable of doing this.

The moment that we understand the resurrection thought of Easter aright, this thought, warm and illuminating, will kindle in us the forces that are necessary for the future evolution of mankind.

Spirit Triumphant! Flame through the weakness of faltering, fainthearted souls! Burn up egoism, kindle compassion, so that selflessness, the lifestream of humanity, may flow as the wellspring of spiritual rebirth!" — Rudolf Steiner

MICHAELA GLÖCKLER

WHERE ARE WE NOW IN THE CORONA-PANDEMIC?

WHAT CAN HELP US TO LIVE CONSTRUCTIVELY

WITH THE CONSEQUENCES?

This 49 page booklet was kindly translated from German to English by Astrid Schmidt-Stegmann and forwarded to council member Walter Rice at his request. We have Dr. GlÖckler’s permission to make it available through our newsletter. Click here to be linked to the materials.

Dr. GlÖckler opens this piece with the following preliminary remarks: In the course of the Corona pandemic, so much has already been published on the subject that the question is only too justified: What more should be written? Who would be served by it? For whom would this be helpful? Who might still be interested in the flood of different views and interpretations of numbers, facts, statistics? In addition, the pandemic has polarized society to such an extent that many are now tabooing the subject in order not to further strain social peace. Therefore, it is only too understandable that uncertainty, fears and disorientation are the result, despite the political and media uniformity in communicating strategic goals and measures. In any case, it was the speechlessness and the feeling of powerlessness that I encounter in many conversations on this theme that ultimately motivated me to write this contribution.

Dr. Glockler ends this well considered piece with a section on Spiritual Sources of Strength, and concludes with this message: Spirituality is not only a private matter or a matter of faith. It is today an urgent time requirement, in order to help to repair the damage which developed as a result of the one-sided technocratic progress of our culture. Since this brings with it immaterial developmental goals and values, it leads of itself to the renunciation of non-essentials, to a conscious consumerism, to tolerance and an understanding of humanity, while also working for a culture of peace.

About the Author: Dr. Michaela Glöckler, pediatrician, has been for 28 years the Head of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, the anthroposophic School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, Switzerland. During this time she was lecturing worldwide on the integrative medical model of Anthroposophic Medicine. Before that she worked in the pediatric department of the Community Hospital in Herdecke/Germany and served as school doctor for the Rudolf Steiner School in Witten/ Germany. She is Co-founder of the Alliance for Childhood and the European Alliance of Initiatives for applied Anthroposophy/ELIANT. Many of her several books on medicine and education are available in English.

New Class: The Tarot in Light of Spiritual Science

James Knight will be offering a bi-weekly class on "The Tarot" in light of spiritual science and practical occultism. This will not be a class on the use of Tarot for divination. In this class we will focus on the major arcanum of "The Tarot" as a practical tool for self development and insight into oneself and the world. For further information and class time and location please contact James at j365k@yahoo.com

Dear Friends,

As we have previously communicated, the Branch has been gifted a $4,000 matching grant to fund rent for our library/community space for the coming year. Update: We have gratefully received $2327.50 toward that goal! This is over and above membership donations which fund our other activities. We are humbled by the fact that some outside our immediate community have been moved to pitch in as well, and we are optimistic that donations will come in over the course of the year enabling us to claim the entire $4,000.

We are looking forward to sharing another sustaining year in Anthroposophy! Let us know what activities you would like to see. You can communicate with us by replying to this email.

Warmly, the Portland Branch Council

Christine Badura, Valerie Hope, James Knight, Walter Rice, volunteer fundraiser Marsha Johnson

Beginning Astrosophy Class First and Third Tuesdays, 7-8:30 pm • 8654 NE Boehmer St. • Contact Diane Rumage, 971-271-7479 drumage@comcast.net This class will introduce participants to the basic principles of Astrosophy in a study of the works of Willi Sucher and Diane Rumage’s work with the stars, with indications that Rudolf Steiner gave for those interested in the cosmos. No previous knowledge necessary. Please bring blank paper and colored pencils to the class in case we need to use them. If you are just curious if you’d be interested, please feel free to come and check us out. Free

The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman Study Group First Monday of the month, 7:45-9:00 pm • Currently conducted on Zoom • Contact Heidi Sheppard, HSHEPPAR@LHS.ORG Free Please join us in lively discussions centered on Rudolf Steiner’s Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: Human Responsibility for the Earth.

Speech Formation and Mystery Drama Group 2nd & 4th Wednesdays, 7:30-9 pm • 8654 NE Boehmer St, Portland, OR 97220 • Contact Diane Rumage drumage@comcast.net or 971 271-7479. Free No experience necessary, just enthusiasm and a love of the Word. Now studying Glen Williamson’s mystery drama, Future Dawning.

Pacific Eurythmy Open Classes for the Community in Anthroposophy and the Arts Monday Evenings For details please see Pacific Eurythmy or call Jolanda, 503-896-3345 or Carrie, 415-686-3791

Man and the World of the Stars Study, led by Cheri Munske Monday Evenings, 6:30-8:00 pm • Portland Eurythmy Space – Second Floor at St. Mark’S Lutheran Church, 5415 SE Powell Blvd, $15 Suggested Donation Limited space available. If you would like to join us contact us at PacificEurythmy@gmail.com

Waldorf Education and Teacher Training Lectures and Courses Conducted throughout the year by the Micha-el Institute Contact Jen Davis, 503-449-7387 jennifer@micha-elinstitute.com

Embryo in Us & Embryo in Motion: Two Seminars with Jaap van der Waal. Two separate DVD sets recorded live in Portland in 2010 & 2017, available only here. These two seminars explore human prenatal development and show how biology is expressing the essence of human spiritual enfoldment. Jaap van der Wal, PhD, MD now retired, was an associate professor for anatomy and embryology at the University of Maastricht, Holland. Contact the Portland Branch.

Great gratitude to the members and friends who have donated thus far in 2022 to make this newsletter and our library/community space possible.

John Beck, Jeremy Davis, Julie Foster, Vicki Hess-Smith, Mark Hope, Valerie Hope, Lois (Tish) Johnson, Marsha Johnson, Timothy Kennedy, Rene Kehrwald, James Knight, Anne Kollender, Barry Lia, Mihoko Lunsford, Lisa Masterson, Cheri Munske, Robin O'Brien, Donna Patterson-Kellum, Diane Rumage, Kimberly Sinclair, Jerry Soloway, Rebecca Soloway, Linda Sussman