The Oberufer Shepherds Play

PRESENTED BY SANTA CRUZ AND MONTEREY BAY BRANCH OF THE ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

The Oberufer Shepherds play is a unique community Christmas event being performed one night only at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, December 15, at 7 pm. It has been performed every year since Medieval times by people around the world. It takes the Christmas story from the point of view of the Shepherds in a unique, humorous, and warm-hearted way, with amateur local actors and musicians.

The cast this year is drawn from Hidden Meadow, the Santa Cruz Waldorf School, the Anthroposophical Branch, Blossom’s Farm, and Camphill Communities California. The special community feeling engendered by this event will be palpable to anyone.

This traditional religious story can serve to kindle in any of us the soul-light that can awaken in the depths of winter.

“City people today are hardly capable any longer of completely appreciating to its full depth what is connected with our annual festivals. It is hardly possible to feel that magic which passed like a spiritual breath through the souls, through the minds of those who believed that they were carrying Christ in their heart during the great festive events at Christmas or Easter. To feel this magic, which passed through humanity in these periods, like a spiritual breath, has become really quite difficult. … If we look at what ordinary people were able to feel when they were presented with the child in the manger … then we can say: such moods, such feelings should awaken in us when we look at what can be born in our soul… ” ~ Rudolf Steiner, discussing the Oberufer play, Berlin, December 22, 1910