Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

hune’s concern for others led him into the Spanish Civil War and eventuallyto China in the late 1930s, where he spent the last years of his life with thearmies of Mao Tse-tung, designing field hospitals able to provide essentialmedical treatment, yet mobile enough to be packed up and set down elsewherewhenever the Japanese came too close. The Chinese consider Bethune to beone of their national heroes. Perhaps his destiny reveals something of hiscountry’s destiny—to become a nation capable of living beyond the confinesof nationalism, and even nationality.CodaHidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,This land stares at the sun in a huge silenceEndlessly repeating something we cannot hear. 17Yet emptiness is also openness, and possibility. Living in a countrywhose history has been more concerned with guarding its spaces and keepingthem open rather than filling them with national content, Canadianshave an opportunity to listen closely to their silences, to search out whattheir land endlessly repeats, to let its mountains, lakes, and rivers comesinging into their hearts, and to discern those signs and emblems capableof speaking to a people whose identity is characterized more by possibilitythan by content.In the poem cited earlier, Douglas Le Pan warns Canadians not tosearch their rivers or skies for the signs, emblems, or “golden-haired Archangels”that have informed peoples on the other side of the Atlantic. 18 Yetthe channels and skies are nonetheless open for a meeting with those cosmicpowers interested in informing the present and future work of Canadawithin the world and cosmic community. In the lecture cycle, The Missionof Folk Souls, given in northern Europe, Rudolf Steiner said:In order that, distributed amongst the various peoples of theEarth, the progressive development of successive epochs maybe realized, in order that the widely differing ethnic typesmay be molded by a particular geographical area or communityof language, in order that a particular form-language,architecture, art or science may flourish and their variousmetamorphoses receive all that the Spirit of the Age can pourinto mankind—for this we need the Folk Spirits, who, in thehierarchy of higher Beings, belong to the Archangels. 1965