Do you hear the bells?

Week 1 of Rudolf Steiner’s “Calendar of the Soul” begins on Easter Sunday.

Why Easter?

Steiner writes that “the number of a year is established by each part of humanity so that enumeration begins from an event experienced as especially significant for that part of humanity.” Different peoples all over the world have different ways of reckoning time according to what is important to them and according to their various origin stories. The “New Year” is different for different people depending on culture and geography - at least it was in the past. Most of the world now uses the Gregorian calendar for official business, even though other calendars are still used for religious and cultural events.

For Steiner, the event of Christ’s death and resurrection ushered in a new age for all of humanity, irrespective of culture or religion. We now live in a time when human being can experience the divine from inside ourselves rather than only through experiences with the external world. This event was “the moment when the powers entered human evolution through which - in order to understand itself and think itself into the world - the human “I” was enabled to understand itself in itself and without symbolism though the power of its own thinking life.” In the past, apparently, people heard the Divine speaking with their actual ears or through interacting with certain representative symbols. Now - at least I hear that voice inwardly, I hear it with my heart.

So wait - then isn’t this for Christians? Well…it’s hard to know what the world was like long ago. Are things really different now? Did things change for all human beings with Christ’s death? What if you don’t even believe in that?

If we can see that a river used to run one way, and then there was an earthquake and now the river runs differently, do you need to believe in the earthquake to take your kayak out on the river?

So Easter, for Steiner, was when this river started flowing in this way, when the stream of experience that we are living in now became itself. You don’t need to believe in it for it to be so, and to have a relationship with the river. And that’s why Easter.

Ok but now…When Easter?

It’s funny that this is a thornier problem for me - or it was until I started researching this post.

Easter in the west is celebrated on the first Sunday, after the first full moon after the spring equinox. The church established this date for Easter in the 4th century. Since 1582 the west has used the Gregorian calendar, and this is the calendar that was carried all over the world during the centuries of colonialism. The Eastern churches and the Coptic church decided to stick with the older Julian calendar for religious observances, and so they now (since 1054, so it’s not a new thing) celebrate Easter on the first full moon after the Jewish Passover celebration.

So who is right? And what if neither are right? Does it matter?

And there are still more issues….

“But the years will be of unequal length!”

“Our desire was to express in the Calendar the objective fact of the birth of the Ego. We reckon from the Mystery of Golgotha, hence from Easter to Easter, not from one New Year's Day to the next. This has been the cause of further derision and mockery, because it compels us to reckon with years of unequal length. But in what is unequal there is life; in what is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death, and our Calendar is intended to be a creative impulse for life.”

Yep, the years are of unequal length, because Easter moves around. Life moves around. Life is not a clock, tick-tock, predictable, mechanical. There are patterns that can be discerned and worked with, but that involves reaching out and experiencing, observing, having a relationship with life, not merely reciting your lines.

Many anthroposophists adjust the calendar so that the “correct” verses “match up,” so that THE Christmas verse falls on Christmas week, for example. One either reads two verses in one week, or skips certain verses, so that the year “comes out even.” And that’s one way to do it.

I prefer to start at verse one on Easter and then just run the year through. The verses come on different weeks then, but I find that they always “match up” with what is happening in the world around me. They always have something to say. The pattern is always new and surprising.

When is your Easter?

So…can anyone work with this calendar? What if one is not Christian at all, and has no relationship to any of this talk of Easter or the human I or whatever? Here is Steiner again:

“Our intention is to create the possibility of a path of self-knowledge. “Rules” are not given…indications are given. Whatever is appropriate for souls always takes on an individual coloring. Precisely for this reason each soul must find its way in relation to its own individually honed path.”

When is Easter for you? Or…when do you experience that life energy steps out onto the earth again, when does hope arise again, when do you see the flowers blooming in the snow? In our lives we can experience many Easters, times when we thought all hope was lost and the darkness would consume us and then the sun rises, the door opens. Every religion speaks of this place of renewal, of the dawning of a new day. Find your own place and time to begin again.

This year, Easter is late. I call this a “Bell Year,” because verse 52 repeats until Easter, the final verse tolling like a bell for several weeks. “In the world I behold Spirit shining in all things…” When we can experience that, see that light of hope shining even in our darkened world, then we can experience what (for me) is the message of Easter.

Living I partake of Life/And true life forces burn in me/Tempered by this holy fire/From death’s oblivion set free.