Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
completely and convincingly,” Arnold Mason would recall. Kathleen Hamilton
was a vegetarian and asked how people could justify killing animals. Eberhard
disarmed her with the argument, “You can eat meat with a good conscience as
long as you yourself are ready to sacrifice your life.” 25 One evening she put forward
a purely hypothetical question: “If there were no poverty in the world, would we
still have to be poor?” A brotherhood member who had suffered great poverty
in his childhood admonished her sharply, asking, “How can you be so loveless?”
She felt deeply distressed and ashamed. Next morning Eberhard came to her and
asked how she had slept. She had not slept a wink, she admitted. “Neither did I,” he
replied, “I was with you as you battled your way through.” 26
Within a few days the newcomers had grased what they wanted to learn and
had reached complete inner unity with the brotherhood. By October of 1934 all
four were simply treated as novices. Nothing in Eberhard’s last years inspired and
encouraged him as much as the encounter with these young people from England
and Scotland. When another young English woman, Edna Percival, visited for a
few days, he was so enthusiastic about her name (in the legends of King Arthur,
it is Perceval who wins sight of the grail, a story told in Wagner’s Parzifal as well)
that in the next evening meeting he referred to the holy grail and the cabala. When
the young woman had to leave he said to her in parting, “You have seen the grail
glimmering from afar. Don’t give up the search until you have found it.” Turning
to Arnold and Gladys Mason he added, “I believe we will see that girl in green
again.” He was right. 27
Incidentally, Hardy had prepared the British guests for the inconceivable
poverty on the Bruderhof. “They live on prayer and potatoes,” he told them. But
they found that at first Eberhard provided them with more substantial food than
was given to the rest of the brotherhood. “The British guests are not accustomed
to our meager diet,” he reasoned. Here, too, the way to the heart lay through the
stomach.
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