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You are here: Home / Events / The Oberufer Shepherds Play

The Oberufer Shepherds Play

December 2, 2023 By Mark Zweifel

The Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay Branch is pleased to present:
Friday, December 15, 7:00 PM at the

Resource Center for Nonviolence, Santa Cruz

The Oberufer Shepherd’s 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

Resource Center for Nonviolence

612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060


Requested Donation: $30 for families (any size!) or$20 per adult
No one turned away.

Susan Cook, David Eyes, Douglas Wylie
The Core Group
Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Anthroposophical Society
a branch of 
The Anthroposophical Society in America
[email protected]

Filed Under: Events

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