Eberhard Arnold

Letter from Eberhard during his trip to Bruderhofs in America

[Arnold, Eberhard and Emmy papers - L.S.]

[Draft Translation by Bruderhof Historical Archive]

EA 30/7

Rocky Mountains, British Columbia

Germany

November 26, 1930

My most beloved brothers and sisters,

My faithful wife, our beloved Housemother! My courageous and watchful Hans, my patient representative in the justice and love of the house of God! My and his beloved Emi-Margret, in your wonderful new work and the joy, discipline, and order amongst the most beloved little souls! My most faithful co-worker Else, who has the precious privilege to be the first to work on the apostolic writings written in the Spirit by those forefathers of ours who had courage unto death! Our Trudi, who, equipped with the gifts of God, share the leadership of our most beloved children’s community, persevering unto death, cost what it may. My oldest companion in the discipleship of Jesus in his itinerant community of all things, which finds fulfillment on Mount Zion in the Jerusalem Church of the Spirit, you old friend, good Suse! My most loving Moni, with your warm heart, looking after the very smallest and most innocent little darlings of God! Georg, you knight of God’s order, our Brotherhood, called to the perfect peace of the sanctified spirit! Big Roland, who with your beloved Irmgard and with your children, given to the church through her: Ursula, little Roland, little Eberhard-Peter and the littlest, Ulrich, you who are called to the smallness of becoming a child and so to his service, humbly leading the work. Irmgard, you dear overcomer of your own excitable nature, you who have already for so many years served the true community and lived in growing dedication in spite of all contrary tendencies, and also given of your best and most precious!

Beloved Adolf, with your faithful heart and your firmly-founded readiness to serve in each appointed place, also to serve the great cause of the kingdom of justice against your own flesh and blood! Our and his loving Martha, you who look after everyone so faithfully and who have always taken the lowliest place simply and unassumingly, in which, though, the greatest promise of all lies hidden! Our Rosel, so dear to us all, you who like Mary keep the mystery of God in your heart and have been a true example – no matter how weak – for our community, not least of all with your faithful, difficult service in the kitchen! And may your example become still truer. Manfried, you heart of gold, you who have been given the courage to say the simplest and most important things again and again in simplicity of heart, to whom such a great share of the responsibility is entrusted for the creative work of providing food. And my beloved Alfred, you faithful Swabian, you who represent the old Hutterian and Swabian temperaments and fight and conquer their negative emotions always with renewed success! And his dearly beloved Gretel, whom we all appreciate and love so much in your self-sacrificing patience and quiet, constant love with the beloved little ones!

And now: my faithful friend and dearest neighbor on our familiar benches, my dear, worthy Arno, with your hard and successful work on the land for the well-being of us all, with your sturdy little life-companion-to-be, who will not be away too long now and who holds so firmly to the flag! And you, most beloved Kurt, our front-line fighter and bearer of world suffering, who soon shall go forward to the front, courageously forgetting himself – not only in the building and carpentry! Our Kathrin-Käthe, beloved of us all, you who courageously give up everything and joyfully trust the church and dedicate yourself to it, you sole representative of Hesse and the peasants in our Hessian and soon increasingly peasant community setup! And my beloved Walter, you first and truly not the last Swiss brother of our beloved Brotherhood, that stands beside you as your faithful bride in all the stress of the fight and the victory! And you, faithful Lene, with your faithful and loving heart, so ready to befriend all weak ones who are bowed down in the fight! With all the school children gladly entrusted to you. And you, our Hilde [Friedrich], grown dear to all our hearts with your anxious little soul, fearful as a bird, which slowly and certainly gains strength to become a firm and courageous heart! Fritz [Leo] and Trautel, you two whom we have grown to love so much, now a couple soon to be filled with happiness and strength and truth, who in ever-increasing faithfulness have held out in the initial struggles against severest temptations and will continue to hold out! And Gustav and Siegrid, you loving couple, who have become dearer to us week by week and under your leadership, dear Gustav, as the head of the family, penetrate more and more deeply into the infinitely precious mystery of the church! And Martha Secunda, from the beginning we have had such trust in your love, faithfulness, objectivity and sensitivity of soul that for a long time we already in faith have regarded you, dear Martha, as what you soon will be, a strong, lively, and creative member of the working and witnessing brotherhood, firmly grounded on the unshakable basis of faith!

Not the last, you three who have returned have a place in my heart: Fritz Kleiner! Gertrud Ziebarth! Josef Stängl! Is there a greater joy than when beloved comrades-in-arms return to the only place where they belong after being astray for a long or a short time?! You, my faithfully loved Fritz, you have in my eyes always belonged to my strongest hopes for the future of our developing work, although I was never blind to the serious hindrances in you that stood against fulfillment. I beg you to recognize fully how grave your going away was as a temporary decision against God and his community, and what an influence such a step was bound to have on those outside. The deeper this recognition penetrates your heart, the more complete and effective will be the freeing of your heart, your incorporation into the community, and your purification and preparation for the communal life. With you, dear Gertrud, you who have always been so dear to us, the thing is not so heavy insofar as you had not grown so firmly and intimately into the circle of responsible members; which I from now on wish for with all my heart through a deep recognition of the truth and through the most spiritual love for the cause! With you, dear Josef, everything you said when you went is surely put straight in the meantime, and I am glad, you beloved first Tirolean, about how you confess to communal work, to the giving up of self interest and self will, to the way of dedication, to nonviolence and to faithfulness to community throughout your life; and for all this I wish you the deepest knowledge of God and strength from God, you dear one! And now, you both, Friedel and Frieder! With you, Frieder Wolf, persecuted by yourself, the world, and the power of the devil, I have always foreseen a similar revelation of your inner and outer condition and expected baptism eventually. At the same time as asking you from my heart to take the clearing of your attitude to baptism very seriously and very deeply, I ask you, for the sake of your future purity, to withdraw from being taken back into the novitiate for a time still because for you, you poor beloved person, it is quite certainly the best thing – and for the church too! Please tell Friedel Sondheimer or read to him my warmest thanks for his confession to community life as the only possible work and life for him.

But now I come to the great joy of my heart, to the beloved circle of our young people and bigger children: my three sons, Hardy, Heini, and Hans-Hermann, who are constant in their fight to help the holy cause forward and who understand in a more and more serious and manly way the Spirit, meaning, and real way of this cause. I embrace them with a firm and strong embrace in the Spirit, that their activity in the future should be at one with and one and the same thing as the purity, unity, sensitivity, and smallness of the one church as well as with its powerful works, greatness, and spiritual power! And I give just as firm a handshake to our faithful helper and co-fighter who has left everything behind, our dedicated Luise, in complete trust and faith for your future in the community. And Sophie and Liesel, who like Luise are my beloved and soon quite grownup daughters in the life of the Spirit, I thank you in the name of the great cause that you like Emi-Margret stood firmly by Trudi’s side (who is so devoted to you) and that you proved yourselves in the test that your relatives put you to when they called you away, by giving them a firm answer and loyally placed your strength in the service of God’s glory and his community! How glad I am about your three girls (“grosse Dirndlen” as they say here.) And you, dear Lilly [Jennasch], after the painful parting from your brothers, you will be soon just as far along, as your dear letter to me testifies. Yes, I was so terribly pleased with all your dear, faithful and fine letters, you beloved children, big and little – more pleased than I can say.

If I wanted to answer you all in the same measure as my joy and strengthening, I would have to stay a very, very long time here and would have to write one letter after another, each one longer than the other! But I will follow your and my great love better if I get finished here as soon as possible and come home, home, home!!! That applies to your dear letters too, Hansemann and Richard, who both, each according to his own nature have continually grown (with all your youthful pranks) firmer, stronger, and more faithful, which is a great joy for me and for us all! To you, most beloved Mölein, you dearest and most faithful letter-writer, to the whole Sun-troop and to all the children, big and small, much as I love you and them all, I will have to write on another occasion. You should not be surprised about your ups and downs; because you are after all still small human beings. You will have to accept and become reconciled to the fact that human nature needs many who are being led and helped and only a few with the strength to lead, who themselves, however, cry out of their deepest heart to be led.

You must certainly expect innermost freedom in the agreement of hearts, but not too much independence in the expression of opinions. The good and pure Spirit will continue to be your real and ultimately your only leader, but not without weak, human instruments who have to show his leading.

The same applies also for us adults, and with this I come now after the personal greetings to what my letter is actually about. How I rejoice, rejoice, rejoice over the clear leading through the Holy Spirit, which you have experienced throughout all these months, as it has been given again and again through those who were appointed as tools for this by God and His Church. You have stood with them in such faithfulness – almost without any interruption (humanly so understandable) – and with the infinitely proven orders of the brothers and Bruderhofs, whom one calls the Hutterians because Jakob Hutter established them with such glowing, burning fire of love and with equally fiery burning discipline. In this objective part of my letter I can confine myself to a few short sentences as a reminder; because you have been crowned and consecrated by the Spirit himself, much better than the rulers and priests of old. And now you have such a wealth of writings which radiate the Spirit! These are by now already more than 150 handwritten books, large and small, sheets and folders, among them over fifty from the very oldest time, so that there are now only a very few Bruderhofs in North America which have an equal or larger treasure of the oldest writings. So great is the love of the Brothers to us that I am certain they will also not let us down in our material need. However, all this requires time, very much time, because of their persevering thoroughness. I have to ask you therefore with a heavy heart once more for further leave of absence, quite apart from the question of my weak health, the changing condition of my sick eye, although it was never again as bad as last spring at home, on the journey, and in June in Wolf Creek. But be assured! I will return home as fast as I can when my task of being united, appointed to the Service, and getting the Bruderhof established has been brought to a certain conclusion. Now, I sense all the time how strong, or how diverted and weakened, the flow of strength comes to me from your unity in the truth, in prayer, in the breaking of bread, and in the community. Therefore in the greatest trust and confidence I want to ask you now from my heart for the following:

Do not urge me to return home prematurely, because the whole success of all these great sacrifices may then be endangered. Trust your leadership that through God’s Spirit it will lead you in unanimity through everything. Be openhearted, open and full of willingness to one another. Rejoice in one another. You have every cause for this. In the same way as you are open and alert in the Spirit, preserve also your fine sensitivity for the purity and unity of the Spirit. But become free from all personal touchiness and keep free from it, from all concern about personal disadvantages, also in your tasks, duties, and services. There is not the least cause for it. Rejoice in all your diversity over your unity in the Spirit and your real standing together, without wanting to equalize all special characteristics. Do not attempt to bring them all in line, to level them out and paralyze them, which would mean to dissolve and extinguish them. Community has life only in a living interplay. Therefore be glad that you are all different and never get irritated about it! But selfishness and pettiness, talking behind the backs of others, envy and jealousy, fear and worry, and worse things do not belong at all to these differences of typical characteristics and various natural gifts. These enemies of life, like self interest and self will, are not gifts but utter loss and harm. But nobody has received so few gifts that he has to choose to become such a good for nothing by occupying himself with such harmful, worthless concerns. Every moment should be too precious to waste on such worthless and poisonous concerns. I ask you, yes, I ask you most urgently – hold out all together for what will surely be just a short time still, in complete unity and in the love and joy of God. Do not waste even one single day, not even one hour, and certainly not a night, with matters, questions, or discussions that would not be necessary if we would all stand together more faithfully and firmly, more trustingly and thankfully. Or to say it more clearly: Spare yourselves such nights by seeing to it that nothing happens beforehand to make such nights necessary.

Please, yes, I beg you most earnestly: Carry your great and sacred responsibility steadfastly like a burning light in your hands. For the sake of this warming, radiant light, do not allow yourselves to be jolted, shaken or perhaps overthrown! Then the mass of all your burning candles will shine across to me as in a Christmas vision, will strengthen me and bring me back with all you need. You know that the incarnation of the Word of the Creator and of his love, the word and deed of Jesus is, through the outpouring of his Spirit, the strength that enables you to do all these things.

My dear, good Emmychen has always reported everything in such a way that I have been able to sense through all the happenings and struggles your victorious faith and power of unity. Therefore do not allow any alien, dark, unclear, sleepy or indifferent spirit to intrude or to rule over you, also not through guests, relatives, visitors, old or new friends; least of all, please, through a work camp in any way similar to the last one. Since 1922, 1925, and now 1930, the time for such concessions to the foolishness, vanity and insolence of people who are enemies of redemption should be past for us once and for all. Do not allow anything, not the least little thing, to arise among you which is in any way against Jesus Christ, his redemption of the world, his smallness and humiliation and salvation in the manger and on the cross; against his discipleship on his way to men and to God, against his obedience to the words of his Sermon on the Mount, against his spirit of complete unity and purity and working reality, truly poured out from now on. The Lord is the Spirit!

Only in the Spirit of unity can we experience the Christ of purity. Only in this way can we come to faith in the almighty God, the Creator of all worlds, suns, and earths, who has become our Father in Christ and in the out-poured Spirit of his church, to whom we belong and whom we trust to provide us with everything we need.

Your Eberhard

Who wishes for himself and for all of you, yes, for us all, and for his longed-for safe return home, this grace of Christ, this power of the Spirit, this love of the Father, as all three work indivisibly together,

Your Eberhard who loves you all immensely in this threefold manifestation of this same power.

The losses from our circle in the struggle for life move me deeply. I am sending the enclosed to Lieschen Zinkhahn instead of many words. May her gift for emotional raptures be led in the right direction! Albert and Hannah’s going is to be regretted, but it was to be expected when neither had an urge to deeper uprightness. I am very sad about Paul K. I hope he will come again. The two Jennasch boys were not very robust. But all those children who have been taken away in these years!