Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul Verse 51

Introduced by Joyce Reilly

Young Woman With a Water Jug, 1662

We have reached a stage beyond the equinox and before the Holy Week and the Easter experience. The light has changed, is more present, and longer days begin. Spring has sprung- we hear- or has it? The weather reminds us that we are on a thin and changeable path between the inner calm and contemplation of winter and the bursting brightness and joy of summer. This time of year signals a turning outward and upward to the sun’s light, and the promise of warmth and freedom and the quickening of nature. At the same time, a paradox exists in human life: this month of April, the “cruelest month”, brings a remarkably higher rate of suicide, and has been the month in which so many genocides have taken their first bloody steps: Armenia, Rwanda, and more. Why?

The Holy Nights of Christmas bring us a time out of time, a special quiet and inner mood in which we can build our forces of spirit for the coming year. We maintain this mood and even suffer it as the winter progresses. Then comes spring, March and April, a turning outward again, readying ourselves for the strength streaming into us from the renewal of the light! Yet we can experience this transition as not complete, neither outwardly fed nor inwardly nourished. It is indeed in many northern climes called the “mud season”, when the snows melt and the earth is full of moisture but the sun is not yet strong enough to dry the earth, and we are often still literally “bogged down” in earthly concerns. We have enormous fluctuations in temperature, high winds, and a shocking snowfall as daffodils bow down with ice. The challenge is to stay in our deepest selves and resist the despair or chaos that results from an un-mooring, being subject to darker forces which stand at the ready.

Our relationship to the seasons is, in a way, our relationship to Light.  We are readying ourselves for the pull outward of the summer light yet maintaining our inner fire, given strength by the Holy Nights. Vermeer was a painter of the Light.

“The gate that silence opens up within us leads to light.  Light exposes with an almost merciless radiance, and in the exposure, reveals the beauty of the real.  Vermeer always painted this holy light… Vermeer’s intensity is focused on the light itself, only visible as it shines on the material world… Every element of the painting, celebrates the presence of the light, revealing and transforming.  No painter has ever believed more totally in light than Vermeer…”    Sister Wendy Beckett