Dying is not an end, but rather a transformation from one state to another state, so we could say with truth that everything lives and then transforms into something new.   Dying is not an end.    The poet-scientist Goethe called this: dying and becoming, and we know the general idea as: metamorphosis.  As nothing is beyond God, then God too can become.   Knowing the truth of this explains the creation of human beings - a vehicle for God's becoming.

In the light these ideas now recall the words of the Third Fatima Prophecy:

"I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.

"After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God."

Christ said: I come not to bring peace, but a sword ...  Are we then not to be surprised when the first image above is of an Angel wielding a sword?  But even this action, by the Son, is moderated by the Forces of the Divine Mother.  Are we not ready now to say it is past time for the Mother to take her rightful place in the Catholic Religion?  Not off to the side, in a small chapel, but right in front of the whole congregation.  Is it not time for women, who were in the beginning of the Christian Religion leaders and Bishops, to once more be the equal of men in the Catholic Religion, if not in the Roman Catholic Church?

Who then, on Earth, is being exhorted to give Penance?  Certainly not just the laity, the women, and the nuns and the religious.  Who has most demonstrated their disdain for authentic morality but the male hierarchy of the Church, again and again and again over the Centuries?   Who leads the parade through the ruins of the City and up the Mountain?  What does this image teach, but that death is to come to the patriarchal structure of the Roman Church so that new life may come to the Catholic Religion - blessed with the blood - with the life essence of the all to often martyred faithful - to be sprinkled over the souls, who in following the Catholic Religion are making their way thereby to God.

And the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  Those who lead may not always be rightful leaders, but rather with their ambition and their arrogance instead be of a lessor moral stature and nature.  And those who are humble, and go last by choice and inclination, they will be first in their moral nature.  The order of the parade in the Prophecy is not without its own meaning.

The City half in ruins is modern times, where Western Civilization itself is undergoing a dying and becoming - a metamorphosis to something new.  Within that broader conflagration lies another, the death and transformation of the Church itself, where all from Pope to the laity pass through the fiery baptism of Christ (as John the Baptist said: the one coming after me will baptize you with fire and holy breath), which fire is the times in which we live.  The castigation of the current Pope is part of his personal biographical fire, as no one of any religious rank or accomplishment is to escape this Baptism.

The Catholic Religion is foremost a Christian Religion.   The Roman Church is a religious institution, arising in connection with political power and compromise, which by that means was founded on sand about 1600 years ago.  When certain (but not all) of the bishops of various early Christian sects united their efforts with the dying Roman Empire, the resulting earthly institution could not but be defective - it was a house build not upon the truth, but upon sand.  Recall the last words of the Sermon on the Mount.

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."  Matthew 7: 24-27

Following its founding the Roman Catholic Church soon fell to earth, and became corrupt.  At every crucial stage of its history, this religious institution failed to practice: that is, to follow In His Steps, but instead made political and social compromises in order to preserve its growing  patriarchal authority and the earthly wealth and privileges of its all male popes, cardinals and bishops.  These sought not to follow Christ, but to seek earthly power and position.  We forgive them because they are human, but we cannot continue to support anymore their continuing  confusion and its ever more deadly effects. 

Recall that the rule of celibacy came to be because of concerns that the children of church leaders might seek to inherit Church property, even though Christ taught voluntary poverty, not the seeking wealth.

Throughout the history of the Church, sainted individuals, both men and women, having engaged in the practice of the true teachings of Christ, went on to found religious orders where practice was the core rule.  Within the Church hierarchy, knowledge of the moral life was at the same time gradually lost, as those within it became more and more tempted to protect the structure of the Church itself.  The egotism of the Church leaders became confused, and thinking that Christian Religion was identical with the dogmas of the institutional Church, the preservation of the Church was assumed a higher moral value than the practice of the religion - the practice of the moral life.  A code of obedience to earthly fallen men became more important to Church authorities than obedience to the teachings of Christ. 

Christ in fact did not teach obedience to men (or to Himself), but humility and service through beginning with the gesture of the Washing of the Feet.  How often, however, in spite of Christ's clear teachings did these voices of asserted patriarchal authority and power speak to us of the Church?  The Church, the Church - we must protect the Church - meaning there not the Religion, but the seats of their institutional power and privilege.  Recall as well the stories of what St. Francis did complain.

In the present day scandals, regarding the abuse of children by priests (and others higher up as well), we see clearly how for generations the hierarchical structures of the Church sought to maintain itself against any loss of authority, which might have resulted from having to confess that the male priesthood had become horribly dysfunctional, and that celibacy itself (something not at all a part the beginning) was asking too much of human beings.  Certainly voluntary celibacy is a wonderful virtue to practice, but as a compulsion it should never have been asked, for then it is no longer a virtue but a human imposed trial.

The real question here, however, is not so much concerned with recognizing the true defective history of the Church, but rather in making it clear that the institutional Church is a failure, and continues to lead the faithful - the Body of Christ - into error, not into truth.  What else is the Third Fatima prophecy telling us, gently to be sure for it is after all a message from the Mother, but still showing us the coming and now present end of something that is necessary in order for new life to arise.  When the prophecy was first opened and read in 1960, we are told that the then Pope was so ashamed at the recognition of his own guilty role that he fell into a swoon, and the Prophecy withheld from the faithful for decades beyond the time it was supposed to have been released.   Who knows what additional folly was born in that failure?

While the earthly institutional Church is fallen (too earthly),  the life of prayer and other aspects of religious practice are not.  When, for example, the Mass is practiced (even if the state of soul of the celebrating priest is flawed), Christ does unite this earthy Church with His True Church that remains in Heaven.   The heavenly Church is perfect, and while the earthly Church is fallen, Christ has not abandoned His children, so that when they call to Him in prayer and through ritual, He Comes.  He is there in the Mass and will be there in the Mass on into the limitless future, just as He is there, with the Father, whenever we pray in secret as He taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:6)  Did He not say: I will be with you unto the ends of time?

It now becomes necessary to add to the sad and already tragic aspect of the many errors over the Centuries of the fallen institutional Church an even greater spiritual crime, although yet unknown.  But first some background, for this crime only delayed the arrival among the faithful of the knowledge of something wondrous - it did not stop it from Coming at its appointed time.

While many of the correctives, to the continuously errant course of the Roman Church, were offered over the Centuries by the lives of the saints and by the founding of the various orders, another stream of Christian wisdom was at the same time intensely excluded right from the beginning.  This was the stream of the Kings, the representatives of the ancient mysteries, who with the Shepherds had also attended the Birth.  The stream of the Shepherds became the disciples and then became the bishops of the early Church - that is: they reflected the pastoral impulse which uses the image, as given to us by Christ, of the shepherd and his flock.  But the magi - the teachers of the ancient mysteries who too had knelt before Christ - their wisdom became lost for a time.

Even in the creation of the New Testament, Roman Church authorities excluded many other Gospels and sources besides the usual four, in particular that which was connected to the stream of wisdom of the Kings, such as the Gospel of Thomas.  While it was maintained that there was justification for this, this exclusion mostly existed as a way of defeating competing ideas and views.  In drawing to itself earthly social power, the early Roman Church grossly edited the possible knowledge and understanding of the meaning of the Christ Event, to accord with its human and flawed determination to make its own limited views simple and clearly under institutional control.

The early Church murdered as heretics many speakers of truth, and destroyed libraries and other centers of spiritual learning, all in order to dominate.  This attitude toward the destruction of seemingly competing views continued for centuries, and it wasn't until secular society and the various kings and queens of the late middle ages no longer instantly obeyed Church authority, that the murder of the holders of heretical views began to wane.   Finally with the arrival of the Reformation and then of the Romantics in Europe and the Transcendentalists in America, did the male dominated Church become sufficiently powerless to enforce widely in social life its rigidly held views through violence.

Of course most know that the Church has routinely silenced independent thinkers within its own ranks for centuries, and the current Pope Benedict the 16th, before assuming that office was in fact the dominant authority over what were to be the right ideas of the Church through his former position, which is called: Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a sense we need to see the institutional Church as trying to maintain its power, first through the destruction of competing thought, and the killing and silencing of heretics (including the founders of Natural Science), both within and without the structures of the Church itself.  Then as time passed, the Church lost more and more its prior public authority as the various Nation States no longer supported it as the official religion, with the result that tighter became its grip on ideas within the Body of Christ.  The still too Roman Church now strangles much needed ideas, such as the ordination of women, with the same deadly intent it once burned heretics at the stake.

But the Body of Christ, the laity and the religious orders, are more and more less inclined to accept that Rome should have such authority.  This should not be a wonder, because Christ said: I am Way, the Truth, and the Life.  The Church has never had anything to fear from the Truth - never, although every act of repression and control was a demonstration of this fear.

The reality is that the strangulation of ideas is evidence of an absence of real Faith.  True Faith, which is essentially trust, has nothing to fear from science, for example, and never has had to fear knowledge, or other Ways, including the ancient Ways and Traditions of the wisdom of the Kings.  Yet, in its efforts to dominate ideas, to compel what is allowed to be thought by its members, whether in terms of moral teachings or doctrine, the Church itself has become the opponent of Christ.  To oppose the Truth is to oppose Christ.

We describe as totalitarian a political State which wants to control thoughts and ideas.  How then should we describe the institutional Roman Church?

One way to understand this fall from Grace into corruption and totalitarian thought control, is to appreciate that social forms (such as an institutional religion) can begin in a state of alive-ness and then over time become sclerotic or hardened, the same way the human body can become hardened over time.

This can also happen to religious orders within the Church, after their founder has crossed over.  For example, the at one time independence of the Jesuits was lost, and they became essentially an intellectual war-like arm of the Pope.  Results were more important than means, and the true significance of the practices of the Ignatius meditations, or essence of the Rules of the Order, becomes confused.  The history of the Roman Church is littered with such ruins.  Fortunately, some will keep the practices of the various religious orders alive, so there are always pockets where hardening and dogmatic fundamentalism is kept out.

Now with this background we can begin to consider the even greater, though yet mostly unknown, spiritual crime that the Church recently committed  (in the 20th Century).

Let me first put this forward as a sequence of hypotheses - as several "suppose thats".

Suppose that as natural science began to dominate the thinking of the world, in its conclusion that all was matter and that there was no spirit, natural science became what in John I would have been called: an aspect of the spirit of the anti-Christ.  In that long ago language, we can still today find the right modern idea if we do not make too exaggerated our approach.  What does that language in John I say, but that the anti-Christ spirit will deny the existence of the Son and of the Father.

This is what natural science does today, in that it teaches that there is only matter, never spirit.  Do not be confused by those zealots who think the anti-Christ is a person who will bring destruction and end times.  This is not so.   The anti-Christ spirit simply penetrates human consciousness in the absence of Christian practices, and then denies the Son and the Father, as the writer of John I understood through the examples he saw in his time.  It (this anti-Christ spirit) expresses itself as an idea contrary to the Truth.

But Christ is the Truth, as our Faith would tell us.  If then science denies the Father and the Son, then somehow it has failed to find the truth.  It may know a great deal, but something must be missing.  Let me repeat this in another way.

Christ is the Truth.  Science denying spirit and saying all is only matter, denies the Father and the Son.  Our Faith then tells us this kind of science must be flawed.  But where do we find a science that knows the spirit?  He promised to be with us to the ends of time - is He with us in this dilemma now?

Most religious institutions believe the situation is one of debate, say between a scientific thinker such as Sam Harris, and between someone of a more religious persuasion.  It is argued by some religious that religion has as its proper territory the question of morals, and they are willing to leave to science the question of facts.  But Mr. Harris is relentless, and now asserts that this flawed science not only should dominate the question of facts, but can give us morals as well.

If we look to the leaders of the institutional Church, we don't get much of a moral example, so what can be done?  Wel, Faith would suggest that Christ would act and not leave us alone in this failed situation - would not leave us bound to the materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit) of present day science.

Suppose He did.   Suppose during the early parts of the 20th Century Christ found a voice for New Revelation.   That not only did Christ find such a voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism (all matter, no spirit), suppose the exercise of that voice predicted Christ's true spiritual Second Coming (just as the first John the Baptist predicted Christ physical Incarnation).  Further, suppose that all this happened in a way in which the problems that might face such acts of Christ could be meet with the standards of inquiry common today to natural science.   Suppose that in this 2nd voice crying in the wilderness, existed the capacity to unite science and religion, without damage to the true nature of either Way of being in the world.

In addition, suppose that the true Second Coming began its principle effects upon the world, during the darkest horrors of the 12 years between the burning of the Reichstag (1933) and the exploding of the Atomic Bomb (1945) - the time when millions of Jews and Russians and Germans, and hundreds of thousands others, were murdered in war.  And suppose that true to what Christ had predicted, that He would come again in a certain form or way, this He actually did: Jesus replied, "You have said it. And in the future you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven." Matthew 26: 64

Suppose that the stream of ancient wisdom - the Kings of the Gospel stories - are at work again today.  Given the opportunity to give birth into life a new revelation - new spiritual truth belonging to the age of science - something happens in the world right in front of the male dominating hierarchies of the fallen Roman Church, and they ignore it, just as they ignored the priests who steal innocence, and just as they ignored the holocaust, and just as they ignored the countless other crimes within the Roman Church, in order to preserve the institutional Church at the expense of the practice of the Religion.

And suppose that this true Second Coming is not the End Times Second Coming, but something else, something more needed and wanted by the Faithful.  Those who want to judge all matters of Christian Religion by reference to the Bible, want essentially to confine the Divine to words in a book, and in particular words as interpreted by fallen human beings.  The Divine cannot be so confined, but is free to speak in any way and in any how It chooses.

What does it mean: to unite science and religion?  How could we know about this so-called true Second Coming in the spirit - in clouds of heaven?  What can be made of facts and morals that combines into something both and neither - something beyond the limits of each?

And, more crucially: What has this to do with Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church?

A story ...

In 1861 was born a man in Central Europe, by the name of Rudolf Steiner.   He was to become the voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism, and those who he had Baptized with the true scientific spirit (the one that does not deny the Father and the Son) prepared themselves for the true Second Coming of Christ, not in the material physical body, and but in a spiritual body.  In the age where science mistakenly assumes all is matter and there is no spirit, where else would Christ - the Truth - come again in this Now, but in the spirit - in the future you will see the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God's right hand and coming on the clouds of heaven.

This then happens in the 20th Century to a degree all over the world, although the announcement of this event was right in Central Europe and right under the noses of the Roman Church, with its vast intellectual prowess via the Society of Jesus.  New Revelation of how it is that behind matter lies spirit, and not only the idea of that, but how to go about reconstructing science itself so that this can be known without ever violating the best that already justly lives in natural science.

Nor is this Revelation dependent upon mere belief.  All the work of this Revelation points to facts, which can be sought and discovered and which lead ever and again toward not only a true scientific practice of Religion, but toward a truly religious practice of Science.  Right under the noses of the self-serving male dominated hierarchical structures of the Roman Catholic Church, New Revelation was/is given and then criminally ignored.

How would medicine, education, social science, natural science, agriculture, art, philosophy, theology, - how would all the vast fields of human knowledge change, if real scientific knowledge of the spirit were joined to the already huge scope of the scientific knowledge of matter?

There are here a thousand stories, as this transformation of New Revelation into practical Arts has been slowly begun (we are only in the beginning of the Second Coming - the Copernican revolution took almost 400 years to dominate human thinking, and now its counter revolution - the true Second Coming, will as well take Centuries to emerge into full flowering).  Here let me tell just one such story (there are far too many), with a small preliminary introduction.

In order for the scientific spirit to enter into the already centuries long scientific age and participate in some kind of extension of the arts of science so as to include the spirit, the crucial subject of inquiry first has to be the human mind.   It is the human mind that is the primary tool out of which materialistic science has been given birth, and it is through the human mind that the New Revelation and the true Second Coming are to be perceived.

Those who aspire to elevate rational thinking are on the right track, but they are mistaken in their assumption that our instinctive thinking is all that mind can manifest.   Yes, we do think, but we sleep inwardly through the real processes of thinking, and it is out of the renewed Kings wisdom that the real nature and understanding of the full spiritual potential of thinking has been born.  Let me repeat: has been born.

The counter-revolution has begun, and Christ has come again.  To the consciously developed and fully willed thinking, Christ is perceivable.   Mind is spirit in action, and this personal spirit in action that lives potential in our thinking can be brought to a condition where it perceives Christ.

In his religious role (among many other roles) as the John the Baptist of the true Second Coming, Rudolf Steiner first elaborated in three books, at the end of the 19th Century, precisely how to give birth to this spiritualized thinking.  Not only how, but he explained exactly in what ways this spiritual revolution in thinking fit within the existing stream of philosophical and scientific thought.  In the third of these books: called The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the subtitle was: some results of introspection following the methods of natural science.

To become baptized by the second John in preparation for our true full baptism by Christ during His Second Coming means only to become fully awake a bit ahead of something that will arise over time in all human beings who seek it, which yet is available already today for those willing to undertake the practices.

The at one time falsely declared heretical wisdom of the Kings has now returned unfettered, and presently makes possible the metamorphosis of thinking itself.  There are many ways to approach this transformation, some more instinctive and some more conscious.  In all cases where some degree of the new thinking mystery arises, human knowledge is extended in such a way that the reality of spirit is added to our understanding of matter.

What happened in Central Europe in the 20th Century, right under the noses of the Catholic institutional hierarchies, and its scholars in the Society of Jesus, was nothing less than the beginning glory of a Christ centered spiritualization of all human knowledge.  Those who took up this new understanding of the potential of the human mind, inspired by (baptized by) Rudolf Steiner, gave birth to knowledge very much needed by present day humanity.  One can not overstate how much this knowledge is needed, and what a crime it was then (and continues today and into the future) for the institutional Roman Church to deny the truths the live right in front of them, and of which they were and are aware.

Steiner called his work Anthroposophy, and as a Kings wisdom he expressly differentiated it from the Christian Religion.  Anthroposophy was simply the science of the new thinking cognition, and like any such science it was meant to live in service to human needs - not itself become another competing religious impulse.  Pope John Paul II knew of this work during his early years in Poland, and as Karol Jozef Wojtlya, he participated in anthroposophical work.  On the Internet one can find a picture of him as Pope with a book on his desk by a former student of Steiner's.

Steiner wrote over 30 books, was quite famous in Central Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century, giving over 6000 lectures, while often during his last years these lectures were attended by thousands.   There was no way the Church was unaware of this voice crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism.

Remember: Christ is the Truth and we have nothing to fear from seeking it.

Let me now take up some small examples of this ongoing work, which are related to each other although sometimes separated as if involving different fields.  Just as modern science often over emphasizes the distinction between disciplines, their reality is only truly understood when they are integrated.

So we have as a ripening fruit of the new thinking, what are called in separation: Biodynamic Agriculture, Anthroposophical Medicine and Goethean Science.  All three of these are joined in their contributions to the health of the human being, and are filled from within by knowledge of the spirit which has now been added to knowledge of matter.   The human being, while on the Earth between birth and death, is both matter and spirit, and many problems of humanity today cannot be solved without first understanding and then realizing in practice the integration of the relevant spiritual facts with the relevant material facts.
 

Below I can only skip across the surface of this knowledge like a flat rock thrown horizontally onto the surface of a pond or a lake.  The details are too vast, which is why those who take up this work make for themselves new religious-like careers.  What was formerly heretical thinking is no longer to be confined to the monastery or the convent, but comes now full born into the light of day.

The more general of these inner related disciplines is called Goethean Science, and one can find excellent examples of its practice on the website: The Nature Institute.  The new thinking mysteries begin with the metamorphosis of ordinary cause and effect abstract thinking into what is best called organic thinking (and sometimes called Goetheanism, after the poet-scientist Goethe who was among the first who instinctively practiced it).    This organic thinking naturally grows into pure thinking, which is similar in a way to the high level concentrated thinking of the pure mathematician, but which is a more conscious type of pure thinking because it is filled from within by a fully intended moral impulse.

On the Nature Institute website, one can come upon many works, and here is just a good example: by Stephen Talbot: On Making the Genome Whole, were current advances in the investigation of the nature of the cell reveal more and more that the natural scientist can no longer hold to the view the DNA is the cause of living processes, but that if we honestly view what goes on in the cell (as understood today), the part does not determine the whole, but rather the whole determines the part.

This idea is significant for all human knowledge, particular that concerning our health.

As well, the human being needs food in order to live.  We are all aware today how poorly run is the social system that delivers food to our tables.  Nutrition is a core aspect of health, particularly of the physical body.  A doctor acquaintance of mine, deeply familiar with biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophical medicine has made the following statements in conversation (I've highlighted these in italics), concerning which I will then offer my own elaboration.

1) The chief cause of death in America is the American doctor.  This is not meant to morally blame, but to point out the fact that the ignorance of the relationship between spirit and matter that so pervades modern medicine - this ignorance kills.  The modern doctor frequently mis-diagnoses, and then compounds that error by using a sledge-hammer when a butterfly kiss is more therapeutic.   All we have to do is listen to the ads for modern medicines and all their deadly side-effects to realize that whatever the understanding of medical science is today, it actually knows a great deal less than it pretends.
 

Because this ignorance is a culture-wide - that is most everyone assumes that it is the best understanding - scientific materialism lives inside modern medicine as a kind of religion, and just like the Catholic Church in the 16th century, when its beliefs were challenged by the early natural scientists, modern science will brand all spiritual views as heretical and seek to punish those who disagree.  But medicine is more art than science, and the true practice of healing requires more than arid facts, numbers and countless tests with machines.

2) The reason people are obese is not because they eat too much, but because they are starving.  The physical body is a work of wonder, about which we still have a great deal to learn (see the essays one the Genome mentioned above, where if you want to get at the core of this drastically incomplete knowledge, just consider that at the cutting edge of cell biology the idea that DNA in the cell is the chief cause of bodily function and form is not longer recognized.  Rather researchers into cell biology now recognize that the parts do not determine the whole, but rather that the whole clearly determines the parts.  This confounds them, for it makes of the living once again a mystery.

In the light of this, from the side of a spirit oriented understanding of nutrition, my doctor acquaintance was pointing out that the body knows that there is almost no real nutrition in the foods agribusiness provides through our grocery stores.  As a consequence, the wisdom of the body is always telling us to eat more and eat more and eat more, because we are nutritionally starving.  All of us eat food with little nutrition, but the obviously obese are just those with a body type and typical internal chemistry that more readily transforms sugars into stored fats.  Everyone, whatever body type, can't get real nutritious food in the regular grocery store, and this is a cause of a great many illness, both physical and mental.

Processed foods, which are too often agricultural waste transformed into profit making highly advertised junk (with a lot of sugar added so we get the illusion of renewed energy and a lot of salt added so we get the illusion that these things taste good) are killing us in the same way the doctor is killing us - through greed and and arrogant ignorance. 

Food grown on farms is meant to keep us alive, not kill us.  To keep us alive, it has itself to contain life - the food has to be itself alive.  Modern farming practices, as the organic movement fully knows, produce foods that look good (with a lot of help from added fake color and surface oiling). but which don't deliver actual nutrition.  The materialist will argue that there is no proof of this, but his idea of proof is confused.  The real experiment is being done on a massive world-wide scale on all human beings, and while we may not yet fully appreciate the exact causal mechanism (what the materialist demands as proof), the history of last 150 years reveals clearly the arriving of all kinds of illnesses in connection with changes in the growth of food and the simultaneous creation of the picture of the human being as a mechanism - as only matter.

You can't see what you don't look for and having assumed away spiritual concepts of the human being, it is no wonder that today this is hard to find.

In Biodynamics the situation is developed further than in organic practices, for the agricultural processes (modern huge farms) of today actually are killing the soil and the body inheritance characteristics of the animals we eat as well.  The living Earth, on which we depend as a fully integrated organism in its totality, is dying, and we are killing it.  The arrogant and ignorant child is killing its Mother.

In order to return life to the Earth, we have to recognize that it is itself integrated into the Cosmos, into the extra-telluric fullness of the whole Solar System.  Nothing is separate from anything else, and it is only the over-use of the presently limited thinking processes of analysis (without wise synthesis) by natural science that has led to this false perception of independence (parts unrelated to wholes).  The moon and the planets do influence plant and animal growth, and we need to include these realities (out of a scientifically oriented new discipline of observation and thinking - Goethean Science) in our understanding of the underlying nature of living agricultural processes.  This is Biodynamic Agriculture.

Biodynamic produce has now become the sought after prize of many gourmet chefs, and as well biodynamic wines are seen as exceptional.  Why - because those who know foods and wines know taste, and nothing - nothing - tastes quite as lively (as full of life) as biodynamic foods and wines, to the carefully developed and cultivated senses of a gourmet.

In a similar fashion as to farms and food, the human organization is not merely physical, but spiritual as well.  We have in fact four bodies, not one: a physical body; an ethereal or life body; a soul or psychological or astral body; and, a warmth or ego or spirit body.  A properly disciplined thinking can learn to perceive these less visible elements of our reality and nature, and while each part is healed in a subtly different way, all are yet interdependent.

My doctor acquaintance has produced a book, which I recommend as an excellent practical and pragmatic doorway into this realm of the union of knowledge of spirit and matter.  He doesn't know everything, but he will be a good start, on a valuable subject for all, to coming to the appreciation of the facts of which I have been writing here: New Revelation is making its way into the world, and the true Second Coming is upon us.  These changes leave traces in human cultural developments - fingerprints as it were, and in Dr. Cowen's book: The Four-Fold Path to Healing, we have one quite outstanding fingerprint.

For example, he describes how with good nutrition, we heal the physical body.  With good therapeutics (butterfly kisses instead of sledge-hammers) we heal the ethereal or life body.  With good movement exercise we heal the soul or psychic/emotional or astral body, and with meditation (good mental exercises) we heal the spirit body.

This is just one, by the way, of thousands of books and works and human activities that have begun to come into the world through the New Revelation and as part of the true Second Coming in the spiritual.  Education is being transformed, as is Art and Psychology and Science and Social Science and beyond.  The presence of these fingerprints is far greater in Central Europe, and has been going on there longer than in America.  The ignoring of this Christ presence, and its offerings to humanity's deepest needs, is the ultimate spiritual crime of the now very much needs to be dying institutional Roman Church.

Unfortunately, it will not die an easy death and with that theme I will next approach a way to understand how to save the Catholic (or Christian) Religion from the no longer viable patriarchal dominance of old Christian religious institutions, for all institutional hierarchical structures must eventually undergo the dying and becoming described in the Third Fatima Prophecy.

A question that may arise, in those who hear or read these words, is: what about me?  If Christ has come again, how am I to know this?  If He promised to be with me until the ends of time, how I am to see Him in the spirit today?   Doesn't he make himself available to all?

As an aspect of the true Second Coming in the spirit - in the clouds of heaven - in the inwardness of the human being - there has also come to be a Second and purely spiritual Eucharist.  In Luke Christ says: the kingdom of heaven is inside you.  So, look inside yourself and you will find Him there.  This second Eucharist does not eliminate the Original, which has to do with the transubstantiation of matter, but does add to that of matter the transubstantiation of thought.  This is the essence of the new Mystery of Thinking.

The Original Eucharist is communal and requires thereby guiding hands, which no longer needs to be a priest, however.  It is simply a practical problem.  To celebrate the transubstantiation of matter - its respiritualization as it were - as a community, requires many hands.  We do not feed ourselves, but each other.

The Second Eucharist in the Ethereal (in the clouds of heaven - in the inwardness of our own Life Body) is entirely personal and takes place between our own spirit (our own I-am) and the Divine, within the temple of the soul or mind.  The practice of the transubstantiation of thought is religious in intention (that is an aspect of our will) and scientific in perception (that is an aspect of our introspective thinking) and artistic in practice (that is an aspect of the contribution of the heart or of feeling).  Some will call it thinking with the heart, although that is an oversimplification.

This potential for the Second Eucharist was known from the beginning of Christianity, and the disciples in Acts called it: Holy Breath.  Recall John the Baptist: the one coming after me, I cannot even carry His sandals; He will baptize you in holy breath and fire.

The practice is fairly straightforward, and was described by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, although since that time it has fallen into confusion and earthly excesses.

When Christ gave the Our Father, He said to pray it in secret.  "But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."  Matthew  6:6

This is the true spiritual mystery of prayer - to pray in secret, not in public.  The practice of public prayer is the practice of institutional coercion and religious totalitarianism.  We are meant to be shamed by this, and its chief fruit is the further empowerment of the priest as a necessary intermediary between us and the Divine.  That time is over.

During this prayer in secret, be all the same bold: say it out loud.  There is no need to be so loud as to be heard in the next room, but it is more a matter of authenticity.  You are in secret, but not hiding.  Speak it with your normal voice.  Let this spoken tone carry the truth of how you actually feel in the moment, even if filled with doubt and despair.  Prayer is about truth.  Speak truly, and then listen inwardly.

Listening inwardly can be difficult, especially if we have had little practice.  It is, after all, an art of sorts - first a skill, then a craft and then an art.  Holy Breath does not shout, for it is of Life, just as the prologue to the John Gospel describes: "In Him was Life and the Life was the Light of men"

Contrary to doctrine and ancient ideas, neither the Son or the Father (or the Mother) is about obedience.  Their love grants us full freedom as its highest currently expressed meaning.  In our time, however, there has arisen, because of the flaws and fallen nature of institutional and patriarchal religious practices, the idea that there are absolute moral principles to which everyone must be obedient.  One can even understand that there may have been in the past some degree of necessity for this approach, because the human being was not fully developed - did not possess entirely what is potential (and this remains true to a degree - we can yet be more).  For that reason a religious culture urging obedience to high moral ideas may have been in the past a bit justified.

Yet, the timing of the true Second Coming in the spiritual is about acknowledging that we are now capable of becoming morally free.  The whole point of Christ's present day Baptism of human beings, by fire and holy breath, concerns this moral freedom.  This idea too is found in the images of the Third Fatima Prophecy which we have been studying.

The City is in ruins - Western Civilization is undergoing dramatic metamorphosis.  What could be more clear from contemporary events we see on the evening News?  Institutional religion must as well transform.  The Holy Father leads the procession up the Hill to the foot of the Cross, there to die in violence not unlike what is being visited all over the world.  The spiritual essence released by this act - the blood - is to be saved by Angels and then offered to us in the future as we continue to struggle to make our way toward God.

Rudolf Steiner, out of the Kings wisdom, taught us in detail how to have a practical relationship to the dead - to those that have crossed over.  They remain interested in our lives, and available to help.  At the same time, nothing that we need is to be hidden from us, if we but rightly understand what Christ tried to teach us about prayer.

When we pray the Our Father in secret, we have made of the mind and soul a temple for our immortal spirit.  This mood of prayer, and the seven petitions of the Our Father, when practiced (remember what Christ said about building our house upon rock) leads us further.  In this temple and in secret we now say whatever is on our mind, out loud and authentically giving voice to our true feeling nature as we are at that time.  We hide nothing.

Ask, seek and knock, He said. 

If we have a question spoken aloud, and the more modest the question (the more humble), we will receive an answer in the inward silence of our own mind/soul temple.  A voice, like in form and texture our own inner voice, yet so so soft, will reply in the clouds of heaven inside us.  The reply will be nearly instantaneous, and almost simultaneous, because even before we speak out loud, the question has lived first in our hearts, and its in our hearts that we are known ("...but then I will perceive the same way that I was perceived all along."  St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13).

Because we live in the time of Fire, the time of the ruination of the City, where the Angel with the Sword is acting (remember He said: ...I come not to bring peace but a sword), and because we strive to walk up the Hill - up the Mountain -  to the Cross - that is because we strive to be moral - Christ's Baptism of us by Fire is that struggle to walk up that Hill - to be moral in a time of great troubles - that is in this time - this present.  If we wish to follow In His Steps, we will not be able to hide from moral trials.

But the institutional Church is fallen.  What moral authority can it present to us, when clearly the male institutional hierarchy can not lead by example?  Christ answers this in all the practices He taught, and which we can follow.  One of these is prayer, and when the fire of our individual biography forces us to confront troubling individual moral questions, we can no longer lean on the Roman Church, but must instead reside in the Catholic (Christian) Religion.  The Religion says pray in secret and find your reward in secret; or, ask, seek and knock.

Good and humble questions take the form of how may I help this other person.  How may I love them.  These good questions are other-directed.  Self-directed questions, such as get me out of jail or what is the right number for the lottery - these questions we already know in our hearts the Divine should not answer.  But if we alter them in the right way, so that we ask (to continue the example) how do I live with being in jail or how do I live with being poor - these questions can be answered.

However, if we put among many possible questions a straightforward moral question into the intimacy of prayer something rather remarkable and powerful, and initially frightening, happens.  If we ask, as did the character in the movie Million Dollar Baby, should I help this person who wants to die, die?  We do not get an answer, but Silence.

The Silence speaks thus: you already know what the right thing to do is.  There is in the Silence no abandonment, but rather a gift of freedom and most remarkably - the gift of trust.  You know, you decide, you act, says the Silence.  The same Faith we have in God, God has in us.

The Silence also says: you cannot hide here by making the Divine responsible for what life and the baptism by fire of your own biography has already made you responsible.  Don't in prayer come to shift the blame to the Divine, or to a book or to another person in the form of a priest or a bishop or a pope.  Its your life, and you decide.  This is what it means to be Baptized by Fire, and to walk up the Hill, or Mountain of moral trials, through the ruination of the City and toward the Cross.

But what then about Baptism by Holy Breath?  What is that about?

Next in prayer we share what we have decided to do.  We take responsibility, and we let the Father know.  We accept the Cup, and with gratefulness.  This Christ lived and taught by example.

Now comes the miracle - now comes the reward - now comes Holy Breath.

We will find that we are stronger - that our course once chosen is joined by Another, who walks beside us.  We walk up the Hill following our self chosen course, and we do not walk alone.  Remember: I will be with you until the ends of time.  Even if we drop the Cross, another picks it up.

This is true for everyone, whether Catholic or Christian or whatever.   To take full human responsibility for moral choices is to be Graced by Holy Breath, which comes not as an idea, but as a renewed strength of will.

All of this, by the way, can happen in an instant.  Life confronts us with many moral dilemmas and choices.  The more we practice taking responsibility, the more confidence we gain in the practice of our version of religion.  Even the atheist will be graced in this way, because the event of the Second Eucharist is invisible, and cannot be known unless we start to look for it.  Not having the idea of it, the atheist will not see it, but this grace is not denied anyone who choses to be moral out of their own insight.

Lest someone think this will lead to all kinds of moral relativism and all the other complaints made by modern priests of institutional religions, the facts of experience are otherwise.  These, who assert moral authority, judge, when having been taught in the Sermon on the Mount not to judge.  We pray in secret and are rewarded in secret and it is no one else's business.

Now don't think you are going to get it right all the time.  Life hasn't ever taught such a lesson, and to live truly in life is to live in Christ.  To learn authentic prayer and to discover and have confidence in our own capacity for knowing the right course of moral action is to bear a Cross - to follow Him and take up our own cross.

Nor are such ideas anything fully mysteries and hidden.  One need only watch these two films of Clint Eastwood to see how artists perceive this reality, without ever having to grasp it in ideas: Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino.  Eastwood plays in both these roles the human face of someone who can't quite get it what the priests of the Roman Church have to say.  His deepest questions, they can't answer.  Not because they lack experience, so much as they are not him.

The Baptism by fire in our biography is personal.  Its not for another, its just for us.  We are individual and loved as an individual which is why moral choices have a very tricky time coming down to universal principles to which all must be obedient.  For example, all abortions take place in an individual context and it is that individual which must deal with the question - the meaning of the moral question is meant for them, and this includes the dilemma of those who want to preserve life.  Their dilemma too is individual.

There is a caution, however.   Which again is related to the absence of actually practicing the Catholic (Christian) Religion.  The anti-abortion movement frequently shapes itself in the form of a mob.  Not always, but frequently.  As a mob it is more like the folks in the Gospels who Christ appears before and says: He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.  Its a teaching story that gives a concrete example of the problem of the mote and the beam - the problem of judging lest ye be judged.  An anti-abortion mob really ought to look to their own beam, first.  Once they understand that, then Christ says, will they be able to help the person with the mote.

A similar thing is true when we think about the current Pope and the innocence shattering priests.  Let's not become a mob.  Let's instead understand that within the larger scale of things, it is time for the Body of Christ, the laity and the religious, in the Catholic Religion, to do something the institutional Church cannot do.  Walk up the Hill and consciously let the old die.  Stop leaning on the institutional Church as a moral authority, and take up the Cross yourself.

There doesn't need to be a reformative mob-like revolution in the Roman Church for there to be a metamorphosis of the Catholic (or Christian) Religion.  Carry your own cross, don't throw stones and have faith.  The rest will take care of itself.

The Roman Church will then become more and more irrelevant.  Already it has had to let go all manner of buildings, because the material costs of the tragedy of child abuse have been so high.  All over are empty spaces, some once Churches.  The City is falling into ruin.  Who said God only shows up in a Cathedral?  Nothing prevents the laity and the religious from gathering together in small circles to actually practice the Christian Religion.

Certainly we can expect the male authority driven hierarchies to threaten excommunication  - that is to deny the celebration of the Mass and the transubstantiation of matter during this rite.  Let them.  Christ doesn't follow the Pope, or the Bishops or the Priests.  They have no authority  whatsoever over Him.

Join in community with others and once more struggle to practice the Religion.  Let the Church built on sand wash away in the storms of the present times.  Walk up the Hill.  Carry the Cross.  Keep company with others of a like intention.  But pray in secret.  He will be with us, and She will be with us.   The Religion is actually very simple.  Savor its simplicity.

Pray in secret and individually.  Meditate (have thoughtful conversations about the Truth) in community.  And last, but certainly not least: Love each other.