The Christian Community's renewed confession-counsel sacrament: a confidential meeting where priest and layperson sit together in meditative listening, not juridical absolution.
Sacramental Consultation in Anthroposophy is the fourth of The Christian Community's seven sacraments, established in the priest-courses Rudolf Steiner gave at Stuttgart, Dornach, and the Goetheanum between 1921 and 1924 (GA 343 to 346). The priest receives the layperson in confidence, listens to a freely spoken biographical narrative, may offer a meditation or scripture verse in response, and closes with a brief blessing. There is no list of sins, no juridical sentence, no priest-as-judge. The conversation is held in the warmth of the heart, around the karmic question that the biography itself is asking.
In Steiner's Own Words
In addition, there is something that you must all carefully, deeply and seriously consider if you really want to practice pastoral care: You must be aware that in the Protestant church regulations today, the necessary contrast between the lay believer and the pastor has actually disappeared. The disappearance of this contrast is seen as something excellent by certain modern convictions, but it can never be a real impulse for pastoral care... The priest must be clear about the fact that he is not the one who is protected, but the shepherd of souls, that he therefore cannot put the question in the foreground: How does the soul of man relate to God or to the supersensible world? but must ask himself: How can I teach these people, how can I care for the souls of those entrusted to me?
What it Means Today
The Christian Community trains its priests at the Priester-Seminar in Stuttgart and at the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America at Spring Valley, New York, in a four-year programme that explicitly distinguishes Sacramental Consultation from Roman Catholic Confession. A layperson who comes to a priest is not asked to enumerate offences against a moral code. The priest receives the biography: the marriage that broke, the daughter who left, the work that emptied out, the illness that arrived. The Russian-born Anthroposophist Sergei Prokofieff, in his book The Twelve Holy Nights and the Spiritual Hierarchies and the sequel volumes on the sacramental life, describes this gesture as the priest holding the layperson's destiny in heart-imagination so that the karmic shape of the events can be felt, not analysed.
What does someone do with this knowledge? Sacramental Consultation is the Anthroposophical equivalent of what Jung approached through depth analysis and what biographical work in the Wegman-style anthroposophic counselling movement (developed at the Filderklinik and Ita Wegman Klinik in Arlesheim) carries forward today. The Thalira reading of it: the Peter Complex (the soul that has denied the Christ in itself three times) is not absolved by a juridical formula. It is met, in a quiet room, by a listener who already knows that the denial is part of a longer biographical arc and who waits for the cock-crow of recognition rather than supplying it. The sacrament is meditative listening as a karmic instrument.
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