Daily Archives: March 21, 2017

Have you ever heard of the Bruderhof? Its an international movement in the Anabaptist tradition. They are Christians who live in intentional communities 23 of them, on four continents and share their lives and resources in common. Heres an FAQ about them.And here is a more in-depth exploration of those things, in whatcould be titled the Rule of the Bruderhof.The movement was founded in 1920 in Germany, as a Christian response to the horrors of World War I and social injustice. They eventually had to leave Germany because of Nazi persecution.

Late last week, I visited two of their American settlements, Fox Hill and The Mount, both not far from each other, in New Yorks Hudson River Valley (see a list of all the US Bruderhof communities here.) The Bruderhof has been fully engaged with The Benedict Option book (start here to see what they think of it). After spending some time with them, its very easy to see why. The Bruderhof has been living their version of theBenedict Option for almost a century. These two communities are full of grace and hospitality. Before I say anything else, let me encourage you to check out this link telling you where all of the Bruderhof communities are worldwide.Theres nothing like a visit to meet them yourself. This short video gives you an idea of what to expect:

I stayed at Fox Hill, a community of large, multifamily houses and buildings, including a workshop, a primary school, and a chapel/meeting room, spread across rolling farmland.Shortly after arriving from NYC with others for a Ben Op conference there (all off the record, alas), we all gathered with the entire community for a welcome. They sang several hymns. What startled me, and delighted me, was the joyful force with which they sang. Ive never heard anything like it in a Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox church. It was genuinely inspiring. As with so much I saw there, its not my tradition, and its not one Im particularly drawn to, but its impossible not to admire the Bruderhof.

The Bruderhof folks live radically compared to other Christians. They really do hold all things in common, meaning that nobody receives a paycheck. That requires an unusual degree of trust, obviously, but you also get a lot in return. The community cares for you. They dont let anybody suffer. They dont warehouse their elderly in nursing homes, for example. To join the Bruderhof, you first have to live in a community for at least a year, in a novitiate a time of testing to see if you can live by the rhythms and commitments of the community (monastic orders have this too). They want people to be sure that this life is for them. If, after the novitiate, an adult wants to join, he makes vows in front of the entire community. In general, they are vows of poverty, chastity (including fidelity in marriage), and obedience (here are the particular vows). It would not be stretching it to call them lay monastics.

They have families, but children arent automatically members of the Bruderhof for life. They can go to college if they like, and many do, and they do not have to embrace Bruderhof life if they dont feel a calling to it. I talked to one man who said that he had been raised in the Bruderhof, but left it for a while. After some time, feeling far away from his own, he sold all his possessions and bought a train ticket back to a Bruderhofsettlement. Now, hes happily married. I still have my train ticket, he told me, saying it was one of the best decisions he ever made.

I dont think I had any particular expectations about what I would see at Fox Hill and The Mount, but I can tell you this: its not like M. Night Shymalans The Village. You may laugh at that, but I swear, so many people seem to think that if you live in any kind of Christian community that separates itself to a meaningful degree from the world, youre bound to turn into a freakfest. The Bruderhof people are so blessedly normal. If anybody finds them freaky, that is a judgment on that person, not on these Anabaptists. If what they have is freaky, then the world needs a lot more freaks.

The most amazing thing to an outsiders eyes well, this outsiders eyes are the Bruderhofs kids. None of them walk around with their eyes glued to screens. They dont have that shifty, unsettled look that so many kids do. They look grounded and happy. They actually play outside, and do chores, and talk to each other. Every single one of these kids I talked to spoke to me politely and with confidence, even though I was a stranger to them. They seem so mature and grounded. Thats the thing that has lingered on my mind since coming home: the witness of the Bruderhof children. Everybody wants to have boys and girls who are like that, but so few of us are willing to make the sacrifices that those parents do to raise them.

Someone in the community there told me that the Fox Hill Bruderhof used to send its teenagers to the local public high school, but they had to pull them out because the moraleffects on their kids was destructive. In 2012, the movement bought a massive seminary built in 1907 on the banks of the Hudson by the Redemptorist order of Catholic priests. By the time the Bruderhof entered the picture, the building was in bad shape, and was home to only four elderly Redemptorists. The Anabaptists bought it and renovated it as both a high school for their community (and some kids outside the community), and as living quarters for a large number of families. Its called The Mount, and I visited it.

Heres a photo I took of the building:

Its enormous! It stopped me in my tracks to imagine that there was a time in US Catholic history when a religious order felt confident enough in its future to erect a building longer than a football field, to educate its priests. And now it is home to a colony of Anabaptists, of all people! You just dont know the way history is going to flow, do you? The Bruderhof folks have been respectful of The Mounts Catholic heritage, and have left its chapel largely intact. It struck me that its a great blessing that this building, which was erected to form missionaries for the Gospel, was not sold to some hotel chain, but is forming new and very different missionaries for the Gospel.

I had dinner with a Mount family, and we talked about what the Bruderhof has to offer the rest of the Christian world in the Benedict Option. If you write about us, said my host, please write that we dont seek imitation, but rather are trying to be an inspiration. He explained that theirs is just one way to live out the Gospel in a radical way. If they have something to offer others, then theyre happy to share freely. They are seeking to get to know believers from other traditions, to share friendship, and to figure out if its possible for us to support each other?

What do I think the Bruderhof have to offer the rest of us?

First, the idea that this kind of life is possible, even today. They do live separate lives, but they arent strict separatists. For example, they invite their neighbors outside the community to come over for a common meal on Saturday nights. The members all work in the community, but they do go out into the world. Again, they sent their kids to the public high school, until they concluded that the moral culture had degraded so much that it was too risky to subject their kids to it. They didnt have an objection in principle to public school, but when it reached the point of interfering with the life they believe God has called them to live, they pulled out, and started figuring out how to do something better. All Christians can admire the sacrifices they were willing to make for their kids.

Second, the example of their children. I had just spent a good part of the week talking to different people out in the world about how damaged kids today are by constant exposure to electronic media, as well as by the deforming aspects of popular culture. These kids are the polar opposite from that! They are wholesome, because they were raised by a community that was determined to raise them in a wholesome environment. You can tell it. Boy, can you ever. I was up for 6:30 am breakfast on Saturday, after which I had to go to LaGuardia for the flight home. It was 15 degrees outside. The oldest boy in the family finished breakfast and went to join other boys in cleaning the communitys cars on this cold, cold morning. The other kids prepared for their Saturday chores (e.g., the girls were going to be helping their mother clean the house). I heard not a single complaint, or the least bit of whining. They just did it, and did it not out of fear or anything like that, but because, well, thats just what you do at the Bruderhof to make our community work.

Again: if this is freaky, the world needs a lot more freaky.

Third, confident outreach to other Christians. They can do this because they know who they are and what they believe and theyre not mad about it.Nobody tried to talk me into becoming an Anabaptist. The only conversations I had were along the lines of, Now, tell me what you Orthodox do when you worship? and How can we be your friends and your servants? Just straightforward, plain dealing, in charity and a spirit of service. We need more of that.

Fourth, the value of simplicity. Anabaptists are very, very simple in their piety and worship. They dont really have a liturgy. As an Orthodox Christian, I am their polar opposite when it comes to liturgy and ecclesiology, but Ill say this for them: these are not people who are given over to innovation and trendiness in worship. Even though I was there for only a short time, I could discern how the Bruderhof weaves worship into all of life, and thus makes their entire existence a simple but effective liturgy of life.

Fifth, demolishing the concept of compartmentalization.For the Bruderhof, there is no separation between religion and life. You live your faith wholly, not just on Sundays. Its supposed to be like that for all of us believers, but we so often fail at it. The Bruderhof has created social structures, customs, and institutions that make this easier to do.

Its not hard to find material online criticizing the Bruderhof, written by ex-members. I wouldnt claim that they are perfect, ever, and certainly wouldnt make that claim after a very short visit. ButI came away from my visit there inspired, not only by the Bruderhof itself, but by the possibilities of life and ecumenical cooperation in the Benedict Option.

One last image: as I was touring the primary school on Friday morning, I poked my head into the room where toddlers are watched. I saw a little boy sprawled out on the lap of a Bruderhof woman, who cradled him in her arms.

Oh, that beautiful child, I said. Hes sleeping.

No, said my guide. He has cerebral palsy.

That child abides in the cradle of a community that loves him and his parents.That child abides in grace and light.

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Life Among The Bruderhof - The American Conservative

Surely there has never been a richer and more deeply faithful model of Christian faith and practice than that offered by the leaders of the Church in Roman Cappadocia in the fourth and fifth centuries. Think of Basil the Great, exhorting the rich of Caesarea to empty their barns to feed the poor, building hospitals for the sick, upholding Trinitarian orthodoxy against the Arians, teaching young Christians the right uses of pagan literature. And Basil was only one among many great ones, even in his own neighborhood: His sister Macrina, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, were all titans of faith and charity, and built a thoroughgoing Christian culture the likes of which the Church has rarely if ever seen.

In 1974, when the great bishop-theologian Lesslie Newbigin retired from his decades of labor in the Church of South India, he and his wife decided to make their way back to their native England by whatever kind of transportation was locally available, taking their time, seeing parts of the world that most Europeans never think of: from Chennai to Birmingham by bus. Newbigin would later write in his autobiography, Unfinished Agenda, that everywhere they went, even in the most unlikely places, they found Christian communitieswith one exception. Cappadocia, once the nursery of Christian theology, was the only place in our whole trip where we had to have our Sunday worship by ourselves, for there was no other Christian to be found.

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Therefore, to argue, as many have, that the argument Rod Dreher makes in The Benedict Option is despairing, and hopeless, and a failure to trust in the Lord Jesus, is a category error. It takes a set of sociological and historical judgments and treats them as though they were metaphysical assertions. Anyone in Roman Cappadocia who had said that the culture Basil and his colleagues had built was not bound to last until the Lord returns would not have been deficient in Christian hope. Rather, he or she would have been offering a useful reminder of the vagaries of history, to which even the most faithful Christians are subject. Drehers argument in The Benedict Option may be wrong, but if so, it is wrong historically and prudentially, not metaphysically.

So the whole debate over The Benedict Option needs to be brought down out of the absolutist clouds and grounded in more historical particularities. However, and alas, this is something that neither Dreher nor his opponents seem inclined to do. Almost every party to this dispute seems to be painting with the broadest brushes they can get their hands on. Thus Dreher: It is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system. All of them? Without exception? No room for familial discernment and prudential judgment? And from the other side, heres the verdict of one of Drehers more thoughtful critics, Elizabeth Bruenig: Building communities of virtue is fine, but withdrawing from conventional politics is difficult to parse with Christs command that we love our neighbors. We cant love our neighbor without voting? The hospice-care worker who is too busy and tired to get to the polling place is deficient in charity? Such an argument would seem to delegitimate most monastic ways of life, which makes it an odd position for a Catholic of some traditionalist sympathies, like Bruenig, to make.

Bruenigs position flows from her deployment of one massive categorical assumption: that we (that is, all of us who participate in this debate) are liberal subjects in a democratic order. Drehers position flows from his deployment of an even larger categorical assumption: that we are all residents of the West during its final decline. Each of these governing categories is far, far too coarse to have either diagnostic or prescriptive value. I want to suggest a model for thinking about the matters raised by Drehers book that is less sweeping in its assumptions than the ones supporters and critics of the Benedict Option alike tend to employ.

I begin with St. Pauls long discourse in 1 Corinthians 12 about the many members of Body of Christ and their complex interrelationship. These members have widely varying functions, but every member should be treated by the others as having value and dignity. Indeed, the Apostle says, those members whom the world thinks of as having the least dignity should be considered by the rest of the body as having the greatest. And no member may under any circumstances say to any other, I have no need of you. St. Pauls argument here has long been foundational to the Churchs understanding of, for instance, the via activa and via contemplativa. By the standards of the world, contemplatives are useless, unproductive, and indifferent to real-life concerns, which is precisely why the Church, when it is healthy-minded, values them so highly. And the material resources generated by those who are active in the world make it possible for contemplatives to live as they do, a boon for which contemplatives at their best are always grateful. At the highest level of Christian devotion, these people who live radically different lives practice what Charles Williams called the Way of Exchange: dying each others life, living each others death.

I think this principle can and should be applied not just at the level of individual choice but in broader social and communal categories as well. Christian parents who teach their children at home should be grateful that other Christian parents are helping their children to bear witness in public schools. Indeed, these members of the Body should make a point of praying for and encouraging each other: The parents and children alike can learn from, and be enriched by, one anothers experiences. This can only happen if each sideif we must think in terms of sides; better perhaps to continue to speak of members, organsif each member assumes the integrity of the others. Those parents whose children attend public schools must resist the temptation to scorn homeschoolers as fearfully insular; homeschoolers must resist the temptation to belittle public-school parents as worldly and indifferent to their childrens spiritual welfare. Similarly, those who are engaged for distinctively Christian reasons in political activism should be grateful for those who may never have voted in their lives but who pray daily for the peace and flourishing of the city, and who should return the gratitude.

What I have just sketched is the mutual charitygrounded in the recognition that the Body of Christ is so complex that it will inevitably have many members pursuing many different primary goodswhich in turn provides the only proper foundation for addressing, as we must, the larger questions of balance in the life of the church. For it is certainly possible, indeed likely, that at any given moment, and in any given place, some of the bodys members will be hypertrophied as others suffer atrophy. These conditions are locally variable, and the accuracy with which sound judgments can be made will decrease dramatically with distancea vital fact rarely acknowledged by those who prescribe how others should raise their children, or how deeply those others should be involved in electoral politics. This local variability also makes it difficult to speak of the condition of the West in terms that will help any given Christian better understand the demands and decisions that he or she must face each waking day. Despite the best homogenizing efforts of technocratic modernity, the West is not the same in Paris, France and Paris, Texas, or in Athens, Greece and Athens, Georgia.

None of these observations should be construed as a counsel of relativism. Some Christians do behave unwisely, raise their children badly, fail to invest as fully as they should in their communities, and so on. But sound judgments are hard to make from a distance. When my son attended public school, some people told my wife and me that we were unwise to let this happen; when we started teaching him at home, other people shook their heads in disapproval at our change of course. Only those who knew us well understand our reasons for both decisions. We would all be wise to spend considerable time comparing notes with one another before we pronounce any confident verdicts.

The sociologist James Davison Hunter has rightly said that Christians in general should strive for faithful presence in the public world, and there are, sad to say, multiple ways to fail at this task. One can spend so much time focusing on ones faithfulness that one forgets to be present, or be sufficiently content with mere presence that one forgets the challenge of genuine faithfulness. It is also possible to conceive of presence too narrowly: again, I would contend that the hermit who prays ceaselessly for peace and justice is present in the world to an extent that few of the rest of us will ever achieve. But that said, and all my other caveats registered, I suspect that if American Christians have a general inclination, it is towards thinking that presence itself is sufficient, which causes us to neglect the difficult disciplines of genuine Christian faithfulness. This is certainly what the work of Christian Smith and his sociological colleagueson which Dreher relies heavilysuggests.

And that is reason enough to applaud Drehers presentation of the Benedict Option, because his portraits of intentional communities of disciplined Christian faith, thought, and practice provide a useful mirror in which the rest of us can better discern the lineaments of our own lives. A similar challenge comes to us through Charles Marshs 2005 book The Beloved Community, which presents equally intentional and equally Christian communities, though ones motivated largely by the desperate need in this country for racial reconciliation. To look at such bold endeavors in communal focus, purpose, and integrity is to risk being shamed by their witness.

If we are willing to take that risk, we might learn a few things, not all of them consoling, about ourselves and our practices of faith. And our own daily habits are where the rubber meets the road, not in abstractions about liberal subjects and the decline of the West. Reducing the scope of the questions Dreher raises to the ambit of the local and personal could have the additional positive effect of lowering the stakes of the debate, which, in part because it has been conducted at the level of competing world-historical metanarratives, has far too often been reduced to charges and counter-charges of bad faith and unworthy motivation. (Hannah Arendt commented in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the self-perceived superiority of the Communist revolutionary elite consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose. If you dont see the True Path of History, then the only question is what mental or moral deficiency blinds you to the obvious. Too many comments on The Benedict Option, pro and con, have consisted of similar declarations about other peoples purposes, leaving matters of fact by the wayside.)

So my chief counsel, when considering the proposals made in The Benedict Option, is to think locally and act locally, too, with the understanding that if other peoples motives may be impure, so too, surely, are your own. Even if you are properly and firmly confident that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, you probably have certain temperamental inclinations that will make it difficult for you to assess your own condition accurately.

The theological virtue of hopesituated, as Thomas Aquinas taught, midway between the vices of despair and presumptionhas its everyday and practical counterpart, too, which should not be confused with it but which has a similar emotional tone. It is possible to despair unnecessarily over local conditions, to fail to discern possibilities that are actually there; and it is possible to be presumptuous about them as well, assuming that nothing really bad can happen. (Surely there were Cappadocian Christians who were guilty of that.) Which of those tendencies you are prone to is something you can know only through self-examination, but self-examination in the company of other Christians who are sufficiently different that they can see things about yourself that you cant. This mutual teaching and learning is part of the ongoing work of the Body of Christ, the body that is also an intricately interconnected ecosystem of communities and practices.

In the meantime, if you are a Christian who is called to life in the midst, in the world, you would do well to find ways to turn regularly inward, towards the traditional ways and means of the Christian faith by which you may regularly renew yourself, lest you end up being not just in the world but also of it. And if you are called to a community of virtue, you would do well to find ways to face outward, towards mission, towards the saeculum for the salvation of whose people Christ came. An intentional Christian community is not a sacrament, but is like the sacraments insofar as it hopes to be an outward and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace. To that degree that hope is realized such a community exists, or should exist, in the words of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, for the life of the world. And it can have that quasi-sacramental efficacy only if it knows itself to be related by Blood to those still fully in the world, who will, if they know what theyre about, reflect from time to time on those oddball groups of believers who just may be learning something of great value that is mostly hidden from the rest of us.

Alan Jacobs is distinguished professor of the humanities at Baylor University.

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The Benedict Option and the Way of Exchange - First Things