Twenty-ninth Lecture

I hope you have noticed that the substance underlying the world [the expression] was used at one point in the Credo: spiritual-physical. This is also related to this. At the starting point, at the origin of things, we do not have the completely separate matter that we have now. And so 'to consecrate' means nothing more than to give that which one applies sacramentally its original spiritual-material power. You now only need to know that by performing such a process, as I have shown in baptism, we attain precisely that which is significant for the baptismal act. There are other ways to consecrate water. It is not necessary to always use baptismal water, although this would be perfectly suitable for sacramental acts. But it is also possible to consecrate in such a way that one has pure water. Originally, in the beginning, water has the power to renew that which is perishing. Thus, the power of eternal renewal lives in water. Now the point is to try to give the water back what it had in the beginning in the sacramental form. So you have pure water, take salt, this salt will dissolve in the water when you throw it in, then you develop smoke by taking wood flour and sprinkling incense over it, you treat the smoke as that which absorbs our word, and you then speak this word to the water: