Holy Night 6

December 29-30 – Gemini

The three nights of the sword.

Peter’s night. Night of the sword consecration.

Everyone needs to forge by her or himself the sword of discernment. With increased willpower everyone needs forge together (unite) the two pieces; the deathless, the eternal and the ephemeral, to discover the truth.

Mystery: The Son of God, Son of Man merge with Oneness!

Rudolf Steiner’s indications for the Holy Nights given to Herbert Hahn

Google translation from German adjusted by Laura Zanutto and Kristina Kaine 2015

6. Heilige Nacht

29./30.  –  Zwillinge

Die drei Nächte des Schwertes.

Petrus-Nacht. Nacht der Schwertweihe. Jeder muss sich das Schwert der Unterscheidung selbst schmieden. Jeder muss mit gesteigerter Willenskraft die beiden Stücke, das Todlose, Ewige und das Vergängliche zusammenschmieden, um die Wahrheit kennen zu lernen.

Mysterium: Gottessohn mit Menschensohn verschmelzen. Einssein!

Sixth Contemplation: Kristina Kaine

Becoming aware of our will is the immediate task for all humanity yet we barely know it. The symbol of the will is the sword. We find our will in our directive forces, some of these forces are very strong, some are very gentle. Will is easily confused with feeling, and we can misinterpret a wish for will. When we wish for things we hand ourselves over to something outside ourselves and in this way dampen our consciousness.

Only through thinking so we strengthen will, and if we have worked with the ideas of the previous Holy Night we will have strengthened and purified our thinking making it accessible to our directive will forces. The greatest use of our will is when we can quieten it completely. This can be like calming a raging storm in an instant. We achieve this by placing ourselves in a powerless state – which in a raging storm would be frightening. Again, we use our will to accept the place we are in, remaining conscious so that we don’t wish we were somewhere else.

In the Bible we read about this in the story about Jesus and the Disciples in a boat in a storm.

“And he [Jesus] awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”” Mk 4:39-41

In this directive force of Jesus the I Am is revealed. Our I Am is powerful beyond our understanding, but the power of it is not to be feared. Our experience of its power at the same times gives us the ability to experience powerlessness just as the disciples did in the boat. When we allow ourselves to feel powerless, we experience the Christ force within us. Nothing speaks to us of this more powerfully than Christ Jesus nailed to a cross.

Sergei Prokofieff explains powerlessness very clearly in his book The Encounter With Evil, he says,

“In this lecture [How Do I Find The Christ?] Rudolf Steiner speaks of one very important condition of the experience of Christ in our time. This condition consists in every contemporary human being passing through a state of complete inner powerlessness with regard to his personal aspirations, and at the same time being able to live in this state without falling into despair or trying to defend himself from it by self-deception and illusions.” Sergei Prokofieff The Encounter With Evil page 94

In this way we unravel the mystery of the will and the “Mystery: The Son of God, Son of Man merge with Oneness!”

Image: Christ in the Storm by Rembrandt 1633