Christmas and Peace on Earth

Mieke Mosmuller

18-12-2024 0 comments Print!

The text below is a literal transcription of the spoken video text.

Yes, dear people, we will postpone artificial intelligence until next year, and I would now like to focus on the upcoming Christmas celebration. We are already in the third week of Advent. Rudolf Steiner wrote 52 weekly verses for the course of the year, and if you read these verses week by week—or better yet, meditate on them—you won’t immediately, but over time, come closer to understanding what invisibly changes in the seasons throughout the year. Let’s say, it becomes visible through these verses. Watch video on YouTube

Yes, dear people, we will postpone artificial intelligence until next year, and I would now like to focus on the upcoming Christmas celebration. We are already in the third week of Advent. Rudolf Steiner wrote 52 weekly verses for the course of the year, and if you read these verses week by week—or better yet, meditate on them—you won’t immediately, but over time, come closer to understanding what invisibly changes in the seasons throughout the year. Let’s say, it becomes visible through these verses. We live, of course, in the visible nature of ourselves within the cycle of the year, and when you become familiar with these verses, you also come to recognize—though you already know it, but you cannot see it—what unfolds invisibly throughout the yearly course. There are 52 verses, all of them stunningly beautiful, but every now and then, you may find or feel that one of them is even more beautiful than the others. And this, of course, depends very much on the moment in the year in which you get to know or meditate on the verse. Thus, every year in the week before Christmas, one of the most beautiful verses comes along. I would like to read it aloud. We published this little book a few years ago, and it contains these verses. But on my website, at that time, I posted a small piece of text every week for a year, intended as a connection from one verse to the next, allowing you to experience the flow of the year in those connections, that you can feel them. This verse for the week before Christmas returns every year, and I think it is one of the most beautiful:

'To bring spiritual light into world-winter-night

  aims blissfully my heart’s desire, 

That soul-seeds radiant

Root into foundations of the world,

And divine Word in the darkness of the senses

Sounds illuminating through all being.' 

Now, you might say: What am I supposed to do with that? It only truly becomes an experience when you realize what is actually being expressed. That nature and the daylight hours grow darker is obvious. We symbolically illuminate this darkness, for example, with the lights in the Christmas tree, indoors but also outdoors, with streetlights, with lights in the windows.

That is the human heart’s desire, because the heart knows very well that now is the time when the winter darkness, the deepest winter night, can be illuminated—not only because a celebration is coming, but because that celebration has granted us a capacity through which we, as human beings, can carry light into that dark winter night ourselves. Isn’t it a tremendously beautiful thought that humans bear the spirit’s light within them, and that in the deepest darkness of the year, it is precisely humans who can be the radiant seeds that illuminate this darkness?

We need those symbols to remind us, but actually, we are the lights ourselves, shining in the deepest darkness of the year.

And that’s not all. It’s not just that the spirit’s light illuminates the world’s winter night. The divine Word resonates in the world’s winter night, and we don’t hear it anymore—we’ve truly forgotten it as a collective.

Once upon a time, Christmas was a celebration where people remembered peace on earth and goodwill to all men. What remains of that today?

Well-known are the Christmas truces of 1914 during World War I. A film has been made about this, but it also really happened that opposing troops in the trenches, who were fighting each other, fraternized at Christmas, ceased fighting, sang songs together, and even shared food and drink.

That is a Christmas impulse that somehow arises in people who are supposed to hate one another—for that is why they are there—but instead, an impulse arises, the true human impulse, which is peace.

How tragic it is that precisely during this Advent season, a high-ranking official, a Dutchman, addresses the world, urging people to prepare for war.

Precisely during this time, when the message of peace should be heard, we are instead made fearful of war. Initially, it sounds as if it is imminent, perhaps even before Christmas. But upon closer listening and reading, it turns out to be about preparations for 4 or 5 years from now.

But that’s not the point. The point is that in Advent, when the world prepares for the arrival of the divine child who ultimately gives us the ability to be a light in the world’s winter night, we are addressed in these weeks by a leader saying: We must also spiritually prepare for war.

To me, this is the deepest shame that can come upon humanity.

This does not mean, of course, that we do not see war everywhere. Of course, we do. But humanity is not inherently warlike, and this is what I so dearly want to express before Christmas. These are not utopian thoughts or lofty ideals.

Every healthy human being who looks into their own soul knows: I am a being of peace, and war is something that was once necessary for primitive humanity.

But we, as civilized citizens of the world, surely we can now be conscious of the fact that in this time, we should prepare for peace, not war.

It is well known that fear in humanity attracts certain events. So shouldn’t we speak of peace rather than war?

Let us delve once more into—not necessarily the most beautiful verse, because there are others equally beautiful, but this one is particularly special: