A weekly children's ritual Rudolf Steiner gave at Christmas 1919, spoken before an image of Christ for pupils in free religious instruction.
The Sunday Service (Sonntagshandlung) in Anthroposophy is the weekly cultic act Rudolf Steiner composed during the Christmas season of 1919 for the children of the Stuttgart Waldorf School who attended free religious instruction. Its text stands in Ritual Texts for the Celebrations of Free Christian Religious Education, GA 269. A religion teacher performs it before a picture of Christ with one or two assistants, and the act moves through four gestures: the raising of thought and feeling to the spirit that lives and works in stone, plant and animal; the pointing to the Christ picture; a prayer the children speak line by line after the celebrant; and an address to each child in turn, "The Spirit of God will be with you if you seek it." Steiner bound it so tightly to the free religious instruction lesson that he called it a third religion hour, and Waldorf schools carrying that lesson still hold it.
The Sunday Service is not a church service and was never meant to become one. Steiner built it for pupils whose parents wanted no confession, so that children outside Protestant and Catholic instruction would not be left with an empty hour. Herbert Hahn led the first one at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart on 1 February 1920, alone, after his colleague Friedrich Oehlschlegel sailed for America.
In Steiner's Own Words
We now raise our thoughts and feelings to the spirit,
To the spirit that lives and works
In stone, plants and animals;
That lives and works in human thoughts and deeds,
That works in everything that works,
That lives in everything that lives,
He who leads the living into death, so that it may live anew,
He who leads the dead into the living, so that it may behold the spirit.
The doer points to the image of Christ. He speaks:
In him took on body, who works as a spirit in the universe.
Christ died.
He came to life in the being of people
Who gave him a home in their hearts.
Let our hearts turn to him too
Let his power permeate us
So that he may work in us
So that he may permeate
Our thinking, feeling and willing.
What it Means Today
The service survived because it answers a problem that has only grown: what a school does with the hour it once gave to confession. Waldorf schools that still run free religious instruction hold the Sonntagshandlung close to the way Herbert Hahn set it up in the columned hall at Stuttgart, red altar, seven candles, the Leonardo head of Christ, one teacher and one or two assistants. Since 1924 the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach has coordinated the teachers who carry it.
Secular research has arrived at the same ground from the other side. Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, argues in Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) that formalised, repeated, apparently pointless acts do measurable work on group bonding, and that the features which look most arbitrary from outside, fixed wording, fixed gesture, fixed sequence, are the load-bearing ones. Steiner reached that place from the opposite direction in 1919: he refused eurythmy for the celebration on the grounds that it was a secular art, then said the thing would have to be a cultic act (Kultus) or nothing.
Thalira synthesis: the Sunday Service is the one point in Steiner's pedagogy where a child is addressed singly rather than as a class, and the sentence spoken over each of them is conditional, an offer held open rather than a blessing conferred.
Where to Read More
- Ritual Texts for the Celebrations of Free Christian Religious Education, GA 269
- Find Steiner on religious instruction at SteinerBooks
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