Middlemarch, Lent, and a raspberry patch
reflections on a faithful life
Welcome back readers, and welcome, new readers –
With quite a few new subscribers, we thought it might be time to introduce ourselves again. We are Norann, Trudi, and Marianne,1 friends who are also all members of the Bruderhof, a Christian intentional community with locations around the world. We post every couple weeks about things we’re interested in, and to give you a window into what our lives in Christian community are like, whether day-to-day happenings, celebration of church holidays, family events, and of course the turn of the actual seasons.
We each live in a different Bruderhof community: Norann in Danthonia (Australia), Marianne in Woodcrest (New York), and Trudi in Spring Valley (Pennsylvania). So we bring perspectives from different locations and also from the different places we are in our lives, whether raising families (Norann with three mostly grown sons and Marianne with five school age children) or living as a single (Trudi).
We live in community with other Christians because we believe that fully sharing our lives with each other is the best way to follow Jesus’ teachings. Having chosen to live this way gives us a sense of purpose: every day we can participate with others in the hard work of building a life where everyone, and especially the most vulnerable, can flourish. It’s a way of life that depends, not on glorious deeds, but on daily faithfulness and vision, which is the subject of today’s post.
Marianne – in Woodcrest, upstate New York
There has been a red raspberry patch at the Woodcrest community for as long as I can remember. At this time of year the hundred or so canes are well pruned back, but with the early warmth, buds are starting to show. In my childhood memory, there is an elderly woman with weather-beaten clothes in the raspberry patch, mulching, pruning, weeding, watering, and harvesting. At that time she had already spent over forty years working in community gardens and kitchens.
Throughout Mary Cawsey’s life she did what some might consider the humblest kinds of work: cooking, sewing, laundering, growing and harvesting food. She was single and had no children, so when she died in 2002 at age 96 she left little physical trace, other than some notebooks in which she had copied poems and excerpts from authors she loved (Coleridge, Siegfried Sassoon, George MacDonald, Christoph Blumhardt). She hadn’t copied the famous concluding paragraph in Middlemarch, but it could have been written about her:
…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.
Mary was born in 1905 in a farming village in the Cotswolds to a working-class family. It was a time and place where an outing in a donkey cart was a memorable event. She left the village school when she was 14, going out to work first on a farm and then as a maid. She later told how she noticed that she was slow at her work, and made up her mind that every time she did a job she would try and do it a little bit faster than the time before. This approach must have stuck because throughout her life she was known as a hard and efficient worker. Later she worked in the kitchen of a London hotel.
Mary’s parents were Quakers but she says that as a young adult she became a “critical attender” of the Friends meetings. Later she became an agnostic. She studied “a pseudo Indian mediumistic cult” and liked to quote the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “Make the most of what you yet may spend, before you, too, into the earth descend.” In her twenties she encountered and debated many ideas and philosophies, trying to make sense of the world. She became a socialist and in her spare time worked on anti-war initiatives with the Peace Pledge Union. But with World War II looming, she says, “I felt that this was no longer enough.”
She set off with a friend on bikes
to find, or help found a group where, free from war and economic pressures, the seeds of war and strife would not grow. So that, becoming free of these things, the love and goodwill which lay dormant in mankind would be allowed to blossom into brotherhood! We – or I – thought that in the time of war madness we would build a sane centre in and for a war-wearied world to return to!
That was a time of war, and many millions were being prepared to sacrifice their lives, and we felt we should also be prepared to sacrifice our lives: but not by fighting each other but by living and working together toward a new day.
In late 1939, she and a handful of friends started living in a communal settlement known as High House in Hereford. Barbara, another member of that community, remembered meeting Mary: “She had her red hair close cropped like a boy, was wearing an open-necked shirt and jodhpurs and was doing a man’s work, hedging and ditching, as well as preparing the ground for planting, really heavy work.”
Mary later said of High House,
Because we were all pacifist we didn’t feel we could take part in the war effort, we just felt it was wrong. So we had to find not just the way of saying ‘No’ to war, which we had already done for years. We had to find a way of putting it into practice, and that was when we started to look for a community group, where we could live in harmony and as we thought, without being under the jurisdiction of capitalists and employers who exploited the poor people and got them to go to war and that sort of thing. We felt we had to turn away from the whole economic basis of the war, and that’s when we started to look for community and brotherhood.
In this small group of pacifists I discovered that there were other things at work than just goodwill, and many tensions grew in this so varied group of individuals. Many came only as an expedient to work in agriculture, or to avoid the war with no call to find another way of life. Some of us really wanted a new way for our lives. In this group I learned how badly I needed correction too, if we were to find a way of loving community. Emotional tensions destroyed our relationships.
As interpersonal relationships at High House deteriorated, Mary made several visits to the Cotswold Bruderhof. She later said,
My first visit to the Cotswold Bruderhof, in April 1940, was a big experience. I found the moments of silent prayer before communal meals so wonderful because people were really trying to put in practice in their daily lives what they were gathered in silence for. I was very drawn to the Bruderhof because I felt that brothers and sisters could call one another from the wrong things in order to come to what I longed for in my deepest heart – a way of real Brotherhood.
In 1942 Mary decided to leave High House and join the Bruderhof, moving to the newly founded Wheathill community in Shropshire. Outwardly, her life at Wheathill was similar to High House: farming, cooking, laundry. A fellow member, Eileen, remembered decades later, “Oh yes, I can still see Mary in her chaps ploughing that field behind a team of horses with a hand plough. She had her full land-girl regalia, she looked like a Victorian cowboy! Later Mary was in charge of the kitchen, she once told me, ‘Oh, you just don’t know how to cook unless you really have to invent things from almost nothing.’” Mary herself described the kitchen work:
The meat ration was very little so we had half of us on the vegetarian ration books, thereby procuring ½ a pound of cheese per person instead of the normal 1-2 oz for meat eaters. As the time went on we were able to harvest blackberries, damsons, and crab apples from the hedges. Nettles were also used as a kind of spinach, and the fields of kale for the animals made a very good green vegetable too. We made the most of the many rabbits on the place, and also ate a lot of swedes [rutabega] and porridge.
Most community members were young, and together they enjoyed hiking together through the surrounding countryside, and community meals and celebrations. But, as Mary said,
The main thing was that we were a little group who had been given the opportunity to find a new way of life and a new way to serve Jesus and that made it a very special time. It was such a miracle that we had been made free to give ourselves wholly to this new way.
She was baptized along with eleven others in November, and made her vows of membership at the same time:
I had a very clear conviction that I’d been led to the Bruderhof and that this is what my life – now 37 years – was leading me to. It was the way to fulfilment to my search. At the time of my baptism a greater understanding of God’s work and his leading was given to me as of a gift from heaven.
Mary was faithful to this calling for the rest of her life. She moved from Wheathill to the community in Paraguay where she lived for ten years, and then moved to Woodcrest in upstate New York for several decades; here she planted and tended the raspberry patch. Her final years were spent in the Darvell community in England. Every photograph of her throughout the years shows the same determined, cheerful and peaceful expression. Someone who knew her in towards the end of her life remembered, “We used to say, “‘Mary, give us some wisdom.’ ‘Huh! Too much talk’ she’d go.” But if she didn’t like to talk, she did write. This was in one of her notebooks:
Time taken for the new life of rebirth, increasing watchfulness, increasing prayer, increasing quiet of spirit – only Jesus can give these things and only for his kingdom alone. When I learned to let go and to trust God and love Him, then it was that Jesus with His forgiving grace was able to draw near to my heart and make it more childlike.
No words can express my thankfulness that we have Jesus for our brother, our friend and our Saviour and that He puts it into our hearts to love and be loved, with all our Brothers and Sisters, for Him and His Kingdom.
Trudi – in Spring Valley, southwest Pennsylvania
“Mary Cawsey” is a name I’ve known ever since I got selected to play her in a middle school dramatization that was part of our World War II studies. My history teacher introduced our class to some of the people who joined the English Bruderhofs in the war years and we enacted “a day in the life of a Wheathill resident”, showing an alternative life of peace in war-gripped Europe. What I didn’t know until today – thanks to black and white photographs – is that she had red hair. No wonder I got the part. I remember hearing that she would occasionally stand on her head because it helped her see life from a different perspective. I did not (have not) attempted that.
To read about Mary for the first time as an adult, I was touched by her honest reflections, and her dissatisfaction with worldly standards that drove her to seek God’s way. She had ninety-six years and I’ve just had twenty-six. What a different world she lived in, and yet the things necessary to draw close to Jesus were the same as now: to let go, to love, and to trust God. Her words bring tears to my eyes. Rebirth, watchfulness, prayer, and quiet of spirit – that is what Easter time calls for. Her life and words show that following Jesus is not complicated. But it takes humble courage and faithfulness.
Norann – in Danthonia, New South Wales, Australia
This reflection on Mary’s life is an inspiration for this Lenten season. I, too, remember the peaceful raspberry-gardener Mary from childhood, but now treasure her wisdom – borne from years of faithfulness – that “Time taken for the new life of rebirth, increasing watchfulness, increasing prayer, increasing quiet of spirit—only Jesus can give these things and only for his kingdom alone.”
Sister to sister, and decades apart, she’s prompting me to refocus, renew, and allow for rebirth in unexpected places. Mary’s connectedness to the land resonates with this farmer’s daughter’s heart: seasons – no matter how bleak – have their reasons; the fallow as well as the fertile.
As I celebrate my twenty-first Eastertide in Australia – a brown, dry, and autumnal time – I reflect on how natural it is to fear decay and loss of any kind. And how, at the same time, the season of Lent and Easter reminds us that sometimes things must die in order to bear a new fullness of life. In that connection, I wanted to re-share this piece that Christianity Today requested I write, “The Ever-Present Memento Mori” on the life-giving practice of remembering that each of us must one day die.
What we’re enjoying
Marianne
The last couple months have been a season of drama in our house, with the seventh grader and fifth grader both acting in class plays. The seventh and eighth grades, with the help of some parents (although not us), gave a superb performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
In a completely different register was the musical written and performed by the fifth and sixth grades. The Hummingbird King, based on a Mayan legend, was a joyful explosion of color and sound and dance.
Most exciting of all, I have just been told that the Kindergarten is also practicing a play, “How the Sun Returned to the Mountain Village”, and I have been invited to the dress rehearsal tomorrow.
Trudi
Although it feels like Winter has begged for a few more days on which to use up his last snowflakes, Spring is determinedly arriving. I’ve been enjoying some warm sunshine, and the flowers and buds braving the March weather. I got my hands in some dirt (that’s a must in spring-time) and seeded a few hundred scallions. Nothing like a touch of green onion to finish off a dish. . . .
Norann
Chris and I ended February and began March in Tasmania, Australia’s southern-most, island state. We were accompanying a group of high school students for a week-long adventure of service learning and exploration. Nothing prepared us for the rugged terrain, wild weather, and pure coastline.
We’re still reminding ourselves that we walked these places, saw these views, swam these waves. We’ll be sharing a video soon on our YouTube channel but, until then, here are some appetizers:
The view from Mount Amos into Wineglass Bay. Hiked the mountain, then trekked back down and swam the bay.
Starfish in Adventure Bay. The marine life – sea anemones, kelp forests, multi-colored starfish, reefs, and tropical fish and birds – is outstanding, but under threat.
We ate oysters off of the rocks, harvested mussels and steamed them in garlic, white wine, and cream sauce, and caught and baked Atlantic Salmon.
Our final day was spent on Bruny Island. Here’s the view from the top of the fairy penguin rookery – Truganini Lookout – into Adventure Bay, and the isthmus (or The Neck) that connects the north and south parts of the island.
That’s all folks. Enjoy the season you are in!
We’re all on Twitter (X) as well: @NorannV, @mair__wright, @TrudiBrinkmann_
Thank you for introducing Mary. She was and is a gift and an inspiration.
Thank you sisters! What a treasure was Mary Cawsey. Alice