News 40: 6 October

Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay

Newsletter 40-24 for Sunday 6 October 2024                   

Calendar of Coming Events-- Diary Dates

In the Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
unless stated otherwise.

• TODAY: Sunday 6th October, 3:00 p.m. Rising Moon Cafe (see below)
• Friday 11 October, 7 pm. Study Group for Leading Thoughts. Michael letter "The Activity of Michael and the Future of Mankind" p81 followed by Leading Thoughts 112 to 114.  All welcome to the discussion.
• Sunday 13 October:  SPRING FESTIVAL
  10 am.  Reading of "Four Seasons and the Archangels" L3
    3 pm.  Stirring of BD Prep "500" with Jen Speedy.
    7 for 7:30 pm. Poetry,songs, drama, talk.
• Sunday 20 October, 7:30 pm. Eurythmy on Tour Performance  in the Taikura School Hall.

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Are These Your Items?

= There has been a delicate chain necklace with a gold pendant in the foyer for a few months.  

= In the Kitchen, for several years, there has been some cash in a bag with a notice about Salt Crystal Lamps.  

= Please contact me if either of these items are your's.  If not claimed within a week, the cash will be donated to the Centre and the necklace will go to an Op Shop.  

Diana  021  706 709

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 Invitation 

to

Rising Moon Cafe

Sunday,  6th October,

3.00 p.m.

At the Rudolf Steiner Centre,  Hastings.

 Rising Moon Cafe follows on from the three sessions on Living on the Pathway towards Death.  Its aim is to provide an opportunity for people to meet together and share their own experiences or thoughts relating to end of life and death.  

Koha towards refreshments and use of the Centre will be appreciated.

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When  arranging the Rising Moon Cafe, we found inspiration and practical ideas from the Death Cafes which began early in the 21st century  and have been attended by more than 18,000 people (often strangers)  in 89 countries, including NZ.  

Rising Moon Cafe will incorporate some of their basic guidelines such as one person speaks at the time, a facilitator oversees the gathering, there is respect for different views, no set agenda, and it is not a counselling session. Anything that is repeated after the cafe is not to be linked to a person.  There is not to be advertising of products or pushing one’s own views like environmental, political and religious.  Its main focus is to give people opportunities to talk about their own experiences and thoughts about end of life and death . 

The name of Rising Moon Cafe comes from the reflective quality of the moon as it reflects the sun’s light. As death draws near, the importance of reflecting on one’s life can also be beneficial as life and death are part of a whole, as we heard in the Living of the Pathways towards Death series.  Rudolf Steiner discussed life after death, and how the first of the planetary spheres that the soul then goes through is that of the Moon, where one’s life on earth is reflected - hence the name of Rising Moon Cafe.

You  are warmly invited to Rising Moon Cafe at 3.00 to 4.30 p.m.  on Sunday,  6th October,  to talk about end of life and death, and to bring our Living on the Pathway towards Death sessions to rest for this year.

 Diana Bacchus and Bernie Raichle

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The Four Basic Elements of Just Punishment

by Erich Gabert
(continued)

Now how should punishing be done, then?

Occurrences can befall adults which they can understand and accept as the answer allotted them for their own deeds by the guiding powers of human destiny, as the logical, just punishments that correspond to their misdeeds.  When the punishing of children is considered, a difficult responsibility is imposed on the adult involved to do for the child, in however modest a way, the same as the guiding powers of destiny do for him or her.  They have to find the just punishment for the child from out of their own being.

Now, although that is the sort of task that is the greatest and most difficult of all, it is also a duty to be taken with the utmost seriousness.  For just as the moral development of the grown-up depends on these merciful punishing experiences, it is no different in the case of the child.  And no educator may shun this task, merely because it is often difficult enough to drive her to despair.

On the other hand, however, it is not sufficient that in the setting of punishments one leaves it entirely to one’s moral feeling, ones feeling for justice.  In earlier times such a purely soul basis may have sufficed, but nowadays it no longer does so.  Certainly, the feeling for justice, which since olden times has been symbolised by the scales, maintains the greatest possible importance for the experience of justice.  But this feeling is now-adays in the process of becoming unreliable and weak.  Whoever wishes to depend exclusively on that, like men used to do, gets onto shaky ground.  Nowadays, in order to become reliable and forceful again, the feeling for justice needs the support, the strengthening and schooling of clear thoughts which are striven and worked for in unremitting efforts of consciousness and which can grasp the spiritual being of justice.

Efforts of this kind recognise in this punishing of the child the self-same four main factors which the grown-up discovered to be there in every case in which he perceived healing strokes of destiny to be behind the events that befall him.  And just as this knowledge could be of help to the grown-up in grasping the task of moral self-education better and better, so can the knowledge of these fundamental elements of all punishment also be of help in carrying out his task of punishing the child in a more and more just, reliable, helpful and effective way.

Here too, in the case of the child, the pictorial mirroring of the deed that has been done plays a big and important part.  The more vividly and obviously the deed and the punishment correspond to one another, the better it is.  The opposite of this, which has to be avoided, is a systematic scale of punishment of something like the following kind, which was certainly used in schools in former dark decades:   Ten mistakes in dictation still comes under "satisfactory"; for every mistake after that there is a rap on the knuckles with a stick or ruler, i.e.  eleven mistakes = 1 rap, twelve mistakes = 2 raps, etc.  ad infinitum.  One can set up such a scale for every imaginable offence.  One only needs to look it up at any given time and one knows what the actual crime in question "costs".

Every child (that is not already completely hardened by such an education) suffers anger and shame at the way such a system of punishment attacks its dignity.

One can argue that this system ensures a strictly impartial justice, because every child is measured by the same standard.   In this, however, there is a fatal mistake.  One and the same misdeed can mean something quite different in two different children, indeed it never means one and the same thing in however many cases it occurs.  Just as two children are never the same, their deeds are also never the same.  However interchange­able they appear to be in their external appearance they are always in a different emotional context, a different temperament, character and destiny.  Therefore, every kind of systematic standard of punishment is something that in that moment denies, even extinguishes the individuality of the child.

Punishment, however, should do the opposite.   It should appeal to the individuality and wake it up.   It should be directed towards the consciousness of the child, to stimulate it and make it brighter.  This happens, when, for instance, a child has done some damage in a garden, and in consequence he is ordered to help with watering the beds for several days.  That is, now to do something good and useful for the garden.  Or the child has been cheeky to a grown-up in the neighbourhood.  Then one will see to it that he is especially polite to him, to apologise formally, etc.

In this way punishment can be infinitely varied according to the child and the deed, and the more exactly it fits, the better it will be received by the consciousness.  Putting right is something that draws out the individuality, because it appeals to the sense of justice.  And the imagination of the one who sets the punishment will have to try hard to make the inner connection show also as exactly and vividly as possible in the outer connection of deed and consequence.

It is this vivid picture character of the punishment which is the greatest help one can give the child to enable it to experience that the punishment is the objective, necessary, unavoidable result of what has happened.   For the child should awaken by means of the experience of justice.  This demands an unremitting effort on the part of the teacher time and again to draw out and develop his objective feeling for justice beyond the ‘sphere of soul emotions’.  He must learn to look at everything that children get up to, like a scientist, with inner composure.  He must place it calmly before his soul, must let it speak to him, must let the deed itself tell him where it deviated from the right, and what must happen in order to restore the living, swinging balance of justice.  Moreover, all personal agitation, vulnerability, annoyance, out­rage must be silent, however justified they are.

At the same time, though, and in this lies most of the difficulty of this pedagogical task, a punishment should never be given in an entirely matter-of-fact objective, unconcerned manner.  That will be felt by the child as coldness, hard-heartedness, and often hurts far more than the pun­ishment itself.  Objectivity towards the punishment and inner sympathy for the child that has to go through it must combine.  And fortunately, they can.

This sympathy for the child will and must come alive, especially as the third of the indispensable elements of beneficial punishment is the awakening of a feeling of pain.   In the same way as with the grown-ups the experience of pain has an effect which both cleanses the soul and at the same time rouses and clears the consciousness.

In this process the painful part of the punishment can be of the most varied kind.   It can actually be purely physical pain, as in the case of a beating or a box on the ear.   It can consist of a strain on the limbs, if for instance, the child has forgotten part of what he was sent to the shops to buy, and now he has to go the whole way again.  Or he has to go without part of a meal, if a child that comes too late to a meal is made to leave the meal again that much too early, and misses dessert or fruit.

But in almost every case, to this bodily suffering is added a mixture of soul suffering which in its nature and variety is beyond estimation, ranging from the wild anger of the child behind a locked door to the most, delicate hurt feelings.  And one can lay down the rule that the actual higher purpose of punishment is all the better attained the more one dispenses with clumsy physical or soul hurts and can achieve it with finer more delicate kinds.

To mention just one example, the arousing of shame is a means of punishing that certainly has to be used with the greatest tact, but just because of this, it has a deep, thorough and powerfully awakening effect.  Rudolf Steiner, in pedagogical lectures, liked to tell the story of a teacher in the Upper Classes in the Stuttgart Waldorf School.   He noticed one day, that, as happens periodically, the pupils began to write one another little notes during the lessons.   He didn't do anything except, with a quick change of thought, lead the lesson over to the development of the postal service and tell them about that.  The pupils were surprised, then ashamed, and the writing of letters stopped, without another word about it.  Similar effects often occur if a bit of impertinence, which is supposed to annoy a grown-up, is encountered by no reaction at all; if the matter is simply overlooked, or if, which is sometimes even more effective, it is disposed of solely with a hearty laugh.

Such a delicate but penetrating feeling of shame often does wonders in respect, to the fourth basic element of punishment; it works intensely on the will.  The children feel themselves stirred in the best part of their being.  They pull themselves together, become more erect, and begin to restrain themselves.  And the result is a promise, from the little ones a spoken one, from the bigger ones better an unspoken one, that they will not do this again, that they want to put it right, or do it better.  The punishment has had its effect.  Their power of discrimination has become subtler and surer, the will forces stronger and more active, and the consciousness has become clearer, more wakeful and comprehensive.  The love for the good has grown.  The child has taken a step forwards and upwards.