Blood, Page One

"Blood!" What word immediately stirs the soul more intuitively, plumbs its instincts more deeply, embraces its gamut more completely, or lures it on more mystically?

Because warm blood, like the fire it nurtures, is, in a very real sense, where heaven and earth meet—the agent of the soul, the patron of the heart, the altar upon which the soul and the Christ are wed—we dare not deal with it too lightly and miss its immense significance. We would be presumptuous to believe we here lay bare all of its wonderful mysteries. But Rudolf Steiner has made available such a wealth of insight on the subject that we must not be remiss in our undertaking out of the desire for an unjustifiable brevity. So let us here pause and reflect deeply.

A road map is needed for this meditative journey to help us anticipate its unfolding scenery.

Contents

Opening Remarks

Only three chapters precede the first appearance of blood in the Bible and only three follow its last, and it pervades the pages in between, appearing in forty of the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible. In this respect, it keeps company with a relatively small host of highly significant terms, some of which either have or will be noted.¹ It seems most notable that among these the term iron appears in the same first and last chapters as does its cognate blood. It is a remarkable coincidence that it is in the fourth chapter of Genesis where both of these terms first appear, and their close spiritual and physical relationship is indicated by the fact that the fourth step in the separation of the Sun, Moon and planets from each other as outlined by Steiner (see I-27) was when the planet Mars initially deposited iron within the Earth's mineral substance.

In 1963 I had what is commonly known as a "near death experience." A pervasive divine light and an ineffably tangible love enveloped me. I remained in the hospital for three more weeks and underwent subsequent exploratory surgery eleven days later. But for many days after regaining consciousness from the first surgery I kept hearing a particular hymn. It was August in Texas, and the air conditioning system remained on at all times. Not detectable by others in the room, its rhythm kept carrying this hymn into my consciousness. I even asked my wife where the music was coming from.² There were five quatrains, with the chorus echoing the third and fourth lines on each one, but I kept hearing over and over again only the first verse and its chorus. The poem in its entirety is as follows:

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.

The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there may I, though vile as he,
Wash all my sins away.

Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power,
Till all the ransomed Church of God
Be saved, to sin no more.

E'er since, by faith, I saw the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply,
Redeeming love has been my theme,
And shall be till I die.

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I'll sing Thy power to save,
When this poor lisping, stammering tongue
Lies silent in the grave.

The hymn was much more popular in my earlier years than in the decades since. But its awesome and mystical impact stayed with me over the years.

This essay focuses what Steiner had to say on the subject of blood upon its biblical meaning. What we seek is a fuller understanding of how it is truly the blood of Christ that works the salvation of creation.³