Committed to Spiritual Values

There are moments in life when a human being can feel touched by something higher: during the rising or setting of the sun, when a child is born, on entering a cathedral or meeting another human being who is filled with the wisdom of life. These moments quickly evaporate in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but when we look back we normally see them as particularly happy moments. The feelings that come to the surface then are feelings of a particular kind: wonder, awe and reverence. They provide an approach to what the human being senses as divine.

In every traditional culture, the cultivation of such feelings played a central role and brought into being the religious movements that we still know today. One can recognise that the development of feelings in this way, though an unconscious process at first, has significance for the evolution of the human being.

Now in a time when a predominately Western civilisation, with its roots in a materialistic science, is extending itself around the globe, the cultivation of the religious must be found again in a new way.

In Waldorf education the feelings of wonder, awe and reverence are cultivated from earliest childhood. The child learns to develop a sense of itself as part of a universe in which the hand of the creator is working.

Heinz Zimmermann / Jon Mc Alice

Translated by Britta Edwards