living without money

as we do

Welcome back, readers, and welcome, new readers –

This post is about an important and unique aspect of our lives as members of the Bruderhof: the vows we take when we become members include a vow of personal poverty, so we live without any money of our own. We do this because we believe that to follow Jesus we have to give up everything for his sake, to “drop our nets” and to be like the man in the parable who for “sheer joy” sold everything he had to buy the treasure he had found. The Bruderhof has a “common purse”, that is, we share all our income and the material needs of all members are met out of this shared resource, just as the first church, as described in Acts 2 and 4 shared all their goods.

Marianne recently talked about what it’s like to live this way on the PloughCast podcast along with our fellow member Clare Stober, and we’d like to share her story with you. Clare works as the Creative Director for Plough Quarterly and lives at the Fox Hill community in Walden, New York.

Clare: I came to the Bruderhof about thirty-one years ago when I was thirty-seven. I’d grown up as a middle class boomer, and to me that meant you live within your paycheck. You only go into debt to purchase a house. You pay off your credit card every month, and you start saving for your retirement as soon as you can. I started in my twenties. People have asked how it feels to give in all your money and possessions. I found that there’s a lot more tied up in accruing wealth and all it represents – the word money didn’t begin to describe what one was giving up. I’ve learned that everyone looks at money differently. I happen to see it as security. I felt like it was a cushion that could protect me against what I called the vagaries of life, and I wanted to amass so much or enough that I could handle whatever life threw in my direction.

So there I was in my late twenties, and I had been able to earn enough because I teamed up with a talented designer, and we started a graphic design and advertising business when I was twenty-four. And so fifteen years later, we were two undereducated suburbanites – I’d only finished two years of college and he barely finished high school – making more money than we’d ever imagined.

But it didn’t fall into our laps. We worked hard for it. It took about seven years of sixty-hour weeks before I felt like I could slow down a bit. We both bought second houses on Nantucket. Granted, mine was a humble Cape Cod, but he was investing in museum quality antiques while I was building a nest egg for my early retirement – I thought. So that’s when I woke up one Saturday morning and I realized I could buy anything I wanted, and yet it wouldn’t fill a void within me that I needed to be filled.

I couldn’t describe that void at the time, but I now see it was living for a purpose greater than my own security or happiness. And when I’d started out fifteen years earlier, I had nothing but a newfound relationship with Jesus. I’d had then what I would call a Damascus road experience. And now here I was like the rich young man and realizing all I wanted was the meaning and assurance of that close dependence on him again. I’d lost my first love. So as I prayed to God and begged for Jesus again to be my first love, and that I didn’t care what it took. And I realized with a sinking feeling it would take everything. And yet I was willing if that’s what it took to have that relationship again. So that prayer set off a whole string of events that led me to arrive at the Bruderhof two years later.

I, of course, left that business, and started to go to a small meeting of Quakers. We met in our homes, and we followed the writings of the early Friends, and we dressed like Quakers. I think that in some ways helped our business. When I would show up in downtown DC with plain dress, they would sidle up to the window to look out to see if the horse and buggy was down on Fifteenth Street or something. It gave us a veneer of integrity, and we actually felt like we really needed to live up to that and those values.

As a new Christian twenty years earlier, I’d heard about the Bruderhof and how they lived like the early Christians sharing all things in common. And since I had very little money at that time, I remember thinking that sounded really radical and exciting. And every few years I would think of the community that shared everything. And as I accrued more money, the less exciting that sounded. In fact, I was no longer even comfortable thinking about it. So when I did finally come to the Bruderhof, it was out of a longing to find something genuine, a living community that put Jesus before everything else. And within the first nine months I found that and a lot more. It took me a while, but here I found Christians living at a depth of life and fellowship that I never dreamed existed.

And it wasn’t something you could see every day or even right away. I found it was only apparent if I went below the surface, and it did come at a cost. I would have to change, and I would need to learn to trust and make myself vulnerable just like everyone else who lived here. And I’m sure I’m not the only visitor to the community who went to bed every night staring at the naked light bulb in the ceiling thinking, “Can I do this?” Or who woke up at four in the morning with what I call the icy fingers of fear, gripping my heart as I grappled with – What about no health insurance? What if the community collapses and I don’t have any retirement money saved up?

And I laugh now at what I found hard because as soon as I became a member, I’ve never worried about health insurance or retirement again. In truth, I’ve had better healthcare in the community than I did before, and I’m now sixty-eight and not even thinking of retirement – I love my work. I’ve also had to reject the idea of being defined by how much money one did or did not have. I had to let go of a lot of what I call false securities. So for me, it’s been a lot of, I would say, dismantling of who I thought I was and what I thought was important.

A few months into my long-term visit to the Bruderhof, a friend of mine and her husband had also gone and visited a different Bruderhof community. And her husband was a man of the world. He’d been on every continent including Antarctica and been to Vietnam and grew up on the streets of Philly, so he was not letting anyone, in his words “get anything over on him.” And he called me from the other community a couple months in and said, “Clare, what do you feel about it? Are you going to join?” And I said, “Well, I’m feeling really good about it.” And he was like, “Well, have you asked where the money goes and where it comes from? Have you figured out all the finances?” And I said, “No, but I don’t feel like I need to. I trust everyone. I trust them, and that’s not a problem.” And he was sort of stupefied that worldly wise Clare had trusted everything.

Early on in my time at the Bruderhof some reporters from the Wall Street Journal came, and they were asking about the community life, and what they could not understand and kept asking was, “You mean, you all work for no money, but you work really hard? Don’t you have any slackers?” No. “Well, what do you do if somebody does slack?” Well, that’s not the problem. And they just kept asking in many different ways, what if, what if, what if, and that’s not the problem.

I can remember thinking after I’d been visiting the Bruderhof for about six weeks and someone asked me, “So what are you thinking?” And I don’t know where it came from, but I popped out with, “This place runs on trust,” and it’s not trust so much in the other people, but trust in their love of God and their willingness to serve and be obedient to God. So it’s not their personalities, but it’s their level of commitment that we are all held up in trust to.

Marianne – in Woodcrest, upstate New York

Clare tells about the trust we have between us as members of this community. A big part of the basis for that trust is the fact that we have all vowed to be faithful to this calling throughout our lives, and that we will be here for each other come what may. The words of the vows we take (you can read them all here) come to us from the sixteenth century Anabaptists who made these promises at a time when doing so held the very real possibility of a martyr’s death. This is the one where we vow faithfulness:

Are you firmly decided to remain loyal and true, bound with us in the service of love as brothers and sisters in building up church community, outreach to all people, and the proclamation of the gospel?

To be “loyal and true” “bound in the service of love” – this seemed like an exciting privilege to me when I made these vows at age 22, and it still does.

Norann – in Danthonia, New South Wales, Australia

There are many liberating aspects of not owning property or being encumbered by coinage, but one I’ve come to treasure is the lack of division a cashless culture creates. I, as a teacher, earn as much as the dentist here. She and I earn as much as the sister in a wheelchair who folds laundry for a few hours each day: a perfect zero.

It means that what we do does not define who we are. Love does.

What we’re enjoying

Norann

It’s jacaranda season in Australia, which means that the warmer parts of our country are decorated with this vibrant, flowering tree. For me, the jacaranda tree is reminiscent of our arrival to Australia in November 2002. Our new home, an old homestead, was adorned with fragrant, purple bells.

After 21 years in the southern hemisphere, the jacaranda has become synonymous for me with the promise of Advent. When our sons were small, the first tinge of purple on the jacaranda tree would prompt comments that, “Christmas is coming!”

While in Sydney this week, I marveled at the natural beauty of the jacaranda juxtaposed with the majesty of Town Hall. I wanted to share that with you:

Trudi

It’s November. Enjoying an audiobook while walking through the woods seems forgivable in primarily gray and brown surroundings. But I’m discovering different, subtle beauties around me.

I just finished Elisabeth Elliot’s book Made for the Journey: One Missionary's First Year in the Jungles of Ecuador. It’s full of detailed descriptions of she and her fellow missionaries’ strange existence (strange is how it feels when you leave familiarity). She had a lot to learn about faith, about the mysterious ways of God. I find that I have much to learn too in my own journey, and I am thankful for Elliot's honest testimony.

Marianne

Since it seems we’re sharing seasonal pictures, I’ll add one of my own taken on my walk to work last week. Every time I see it I start hearing Edith Piaf sing Autumn Leaves, so I’ll leave you with that.

Until next time!