Dona Nobis Pacem Linkup Book Review: En Busca de Paz

Today's blog posts (both of them) reflect Mimi Lennox's call for posts on the topic of radiating peace from within out into the world. It just happens that the Christian book I've been reading this week is on that exact topic. This book is about a Christian group who try to carry peace from their prayers out into the world. Mimi invited everyone to customize their peace graphic, but I only really know how to do graphics with Zazzle, so I've copied and pasted one of her basic ones.

Title: En Busca de Paz 

Author: Johann Christoph Arnold

Translator: Juan Segarra Palmer

Date: 2015

Publisher: Plough

ISBN: 978-0-87486-000-9

Length: 248 pages

Quote: "Se habla constantemente de paz, pero hay muy poca."

This book is available in English; the English edition came out first. Sometimes I find it useful, when a book is available in two or three languages, to read the Spanish or French edition first. It is slower reading; it helps me focus on what may be fresh ideas stated in familiar phrases. Just as some teachers urge us to read the "copyright Bibles" because the Authorized Version is so familiar that we may get lost in pleasant memories and overlook the meaning of the words we study, I find that reading in a different language helps me to think past previous experiences with people who used popular phrases and consider whether this writer may be using the same phrases to say a different thing. 

This book serves two main purposes. One is to teach us about the history of the Bruderhof group as one of the "Peace Churches"; the other is to share what the author has learned, from a long religious life, about the peace of Christ. 

It is valuable, and should be in libraries, as an historical artefact. Here are the testimonies of Bruderhof members, now mostly old people, from Europe and from South and North America, explaining why they chose a sort of voluntary small-scale communism, or communalism, as an essential part of their Christian practice. Although some of them came to the Bruderhof because of conflicts at home, work, or school, some lost their positions only after joining the group. One or two were addicts who drifted in off the streets, but more were middle-class people who wanted a deeper, more radical religious practice than they had had before. These people felt a special vocation to live in communities along with their callings to oppose war.

It is also valuable for Christian readers because of its thoroughly detailed discussion of how people manage to live in peace after giving up the simple, natural solution to interpersonal problems: interpersonal space. A good healthy distance allows all the world to live in harmony. When people want to reduce that distance, the question arises how they do it? 

My guess is that those people must be extroverts and the Bruderhof is yet another church for extroverts alone, but some of Arnold's language in this book suggests that masochism is also involved. 

Why do Christians suffer? Because we live in a flawed world. What consolation does Christianity offer? When Christianity works, a group of Christians actively reduce one another's suffering: they tend and distract the sick, they trade with the poor with a long-term goal of relieving poverty, they shelter those who have lost their homes and visit or write to those who have been imprisoned for being Christians. In many churches it's hard to see any evidence of this being done; in a welfare state it's far too easy for churchgoers to say "Oh well, they can always go on welfare...and why is it that, when I'm not physically attracted to anyone in the room, I don't feel anything special about going to church?!" Before welfare states were invented Christians used to be known for falling into a different trap--embracing suffering for its own sake, becoming infatuated with suffering, imagining that we become better people by suffering more; this is known as masochism. They didn't just take a quick cold shower to distract themselves from an unproductive train of thought; they deliberately sought the experiences of frostbite and pneumonia. Masochistic religious groups flourished in the medieval era, when the incidence of gruesome diseases was high, and true believers seem to have made a positive effort to infect themselves with as many diseases as possible while subjecting themselves to hunger, cold, and filth; we don't need further details, although they have been documented. If Christians do think of going out of our way to help others, we're "radical." The Bruderhof certainly qualify as radical Christians whose self-supporting communities have stayed out of the welfare trap and made real efforts to reduce the large-scale suffering of humankind from starvation and diseases. 

How much of human suffering is small-scale, caused by too much physical proximity to others? A great deal  How can Christians relieve that kind of suffering? We can reduce it by increasing interpersonal distance; we can treat its root cause by teaching people how to show respect for others if they don't naturally feel it; we can be masochistic about it and, while perhaps being able to feel that we are burning ourselves out for God, misrepresent Christ by being part of the harmful effort to normalize extroversion. There may be other possibilities. I'm afraid that what Arnold describes in this book looks like the masochistic one. 

Most people participate in schemes that pool resources toward a common goal to some limited extent, but never consider giving all of their resources to an "intentional community" beyond marriage. Some marriage contracts even intend to limit the material commitment to the marriage. So, most readers of this book will find Arnold's description of how Bruderhof groups pack people into every room in every house, and survive, merely interesting as a sociological pattern of minority behavior. Some Christian widows, however, may be more interested in the idea of leaivng their estates to groups who will function in the places of the children they may have lost, or never had, by the time they need home care. These people (male or female) may be very much interested in how the Bruderhof live. They need this book. 

Another category of readers who will be interested in this book are Christians who've been attracted to "the social gospel" but recognized that socialist totalitarian government has sometimes managed to reduce wealth, but only to expand poverty. It's easy to waffle about how loss of individual incentives discourages individual workers from doing more to increase overall profitability. That happens, and then there's also the truth that absolute power corrupts absolutely and, when governments are given a chance to cheat the people, they invariably do. We must uncompromisingly reject socialism. We must find ways to move beyond even the benign "Social Security" pension schemes in the English-speaking countries--benign, but unsustainable, and intended to lead people into the trap of expanding socialist government. The easiest way to defy this "devil" is to say "No Social Security pension for me! Whatever I paid in, I paid to support my parents," and while I personally intend to work for my living until I die, people whose elders have led them to anticipate a long painful decline may be looking for a nice monastic order to join about now. 

(Disclaimer: I know nothing about different religious or secular intentional communities' policies with regard to Social Security pensions. Nor vice versa. Such groups prefer to take in members who are dedicated to working for the group's mission, without thinking of retirement...but it must be admitted that many of Europe's medieval saints "founded" this and that and accomplished other good works by running to the nearest convent to sign over their land as soon as some other family member was buried.) 

Well, if you would prefer to adopt some religious people as son-and-daughter surrogates, the only respectable way to do that is to get to know them, work with them, and join them while you still have some years of service to offer them. Old left-wingers may find the Bruderhof congenial. Reading Arnold's words, I can imagine a Bruderhof group being congenial to somebody like Zahara Heckscher--to the extent that there may be other people like Z Heckscher--and that is high praise indeed. The "miraculous grace" that allows these groups to live together, a married couple sharing their home with any number of students and elders and disabled people, and the fact that the Bruderhof has grown steadily around the world, offers hope that a religious approach to social problems may do more than political approaches have done.

For me, personally...I sit on my hill up above the town and remember my kinfolk who have gone on. I always loved my home for the privacy it afforded. Houses were built by people who needed to be close together for physical safety, one to two hundred years ago, but also needed to be well separated, from one another and from their townsfolk, for safety from the plagues that ravaged my town a hundred years ago. I love the place itself, the rocks and trees. I enjoy being here. I have a healthy introvert brain and never feel lonely, though I have outlived many good people and my home is where I'm most often reminded of most of them. I do not want just to bring in more people, any old people. But I remember that my paternal-line ancestor was a German Anabaptist; none of the women his male-line descendants married was German, and by 1860 they were no longer radical pacifists if they'd ever been, but they were radical Christians. I think my father, who never tried sharing a house with another couple after marriage, and my grandfather, who did, would have liked Johann Christoph Arnold. I may not always agree with him, but I enjoy his writing.