Cloistered in the Countryside

          In middle March our Brot u. Rosen core community (The Germans) plus me, and one of the refugee women plus a refugee child went on our “Gemeinschaftswochenende” or Community Weekend in Imshausen, a cloister in the countryside of the state of Hessen.  I don’t know if Imshausen really is a cloister or not; (for one, they are protestant), but the community is made up of a bunch of celibate singles living a pretty set-apart existence involving devotions/prayer four times a day.  (Lots of beautiful mantra-like singing.) So, that’s cloister enough for me. Farmland and forest surrounds Imshausen, which stands on a steep hill above the little village in the valley.  You could say it is almost Heidi-esque minus the Alps and plus the intentional Christian community. 
            I and some of my colleagues (the rest came later in the week) were there for the Ora-et-Labora, which in Latin means the Prayer and Work week. The majority of those who live in the community are elderly, and need a lot of help with the Labora so to speak. (They’ve got the Ora pretty down pat).  Work for the week included chopping firewood, collecting firewood, cooking, planting trees, cleaning buildings, canning honey and supervising the rambunctious Brot u. Rosen children who want to drive your tractor. About a dozen others came to this open work week to help out, including a man who had lived with Mennonites in the US, Canada, and South America!   
            Imshausen is made of of multiple wooden buildings with wooden staircases and lofts and wood-burning stoves.  Most of the buildings are dimly lit with those globe thingys that look like they’re from Ikea. The work that I myself took part in: planting trees, collecting pinecones and firewood, and cleaning buildings. I only helped for one afternoon with the trees (they were planting a hedge). The weather at the beginning of the week was soggy and gray (typical) and I seemed to be they only one who thought the little baby trees were adorable. After that experience, I spent about a half an hour scraping away at the mud caked into the bottom of my sneakers with a stick. Which broke, so I had to find another one.  Seriously, who thought that carving whole geographies into the bottom of a sneaker was a good idea?  However, I am happy to report that scampering around the landscape in the gorgeous 70-degree and sunny weather that followed later in the week ended up restoring my sneakers to something akin to their former glory. 
            We collected pinecones and firewood in the most beautiful weather of beautiful weathers, I didn’t even need my winter jacket, and that’s saying something! I was a bit unnerved by the fact that the children (ages 9-12) were all taking turns driving the tractor that I was riding on.  I was also asked if I wanted to drive the tractor. I did not.
          But mostly, I helped with the cleaning. The woman in charge of the operation was a nice elderly lady who had joined the community to help raise WWII orphans. We cleaned the upper floor of the big meeting building, one of the residential buildings, and the chapel, wherein I accidently bumped the hanging crucifix with a broom that I was using to destroy spider webs. But I figure Jesus suffered worse. Actually, I found that the broom for destroying spider webs was also excellent for killing flies.  I feel like there is some sort of irony in that somewhere.  

          So, while the B and R kids played ping pong and drove tractors, the core members met together to discuss finances and other communal issues (all money, donated and earned, is shared in a communistic kind of way). In this, they sought advice from the Imshausen community, which I learned is B and R’s mother community. Brot und Rosen may not have been conceived in Imshausen, but the idea was fleshed out and the structure built by the original B and R crew while meeting in Imshausen.   Eventually, however, we had to pack up all of our woodsmoke-smelling things and head on back to Hamburg, where a sad reality awaited us; but that’s a topic for another blog.