Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Jena and then, following 1897, in Halle. Spiritual matters had fascinated her ever
since a friend had introduced her to the family of Pastor Meinhof, a minister in
Halle. As a teenager she had taken great interest in the history of the Moravian
Brethren and their founder, Zinzendorf. She became absorbed in studying old and
new hymns and spiritual songs, and read with enthusiasm Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ. A parallel experience?
At seventeen Emmy enrolled as a student nurse at the deaconesses’ institute
in Halle. At nineteen she worked for a time as a nanny for Pastor Freybe and his
family, friends in Stappenbeck near Salzwedel (about seventy miles southeast of
Hamburg). She sent 1905 working as an intern at the deaconesses’ center, but
gave it up by the end of the year because of poor health and emotional burnout.
Pastor Freybe arranged for her to begin work in February of 1906 at the hospital
of the Order of St. John in Salzwedel. Emmy worked gladly and dedicatedly as
a nurse, but the suffering and death that so often confronted her – both in the
hospital and, from an early age, within her own family – made her think about the
sometimes mysterious will of God, about his compassion, and about the brevity
of life. “What troubled me was that I felt something divided me from God,” she
later said about this period. “I could not understand how God, who is pure and
holy, had chosen such unholy people for his own, and I found no real answer to
this question…”
In this inner state and lured by a certain curiosity, Emmy von Hollander made
her way to Frau Baehr’s drawing room. Upon arrival in Halle for a month’s holiday
with her parents, she had found her siblings full of enthusiasm over Ludwig von
Gerdtell’s lectures. At afternoon coffee and other social occasions she had heard
people openly discussing “whether the atonement of Christ still has power and
significance today.” The whole city seemed to breathe a different spirit. “How I
longed that I, too, would be gripped by this spirit.”
After the evening at Frau Baehr’s, Emmy did not see Eberhard for a while. He
had gone to the Harz Mountains for a few days to become clear about his own
feelings toward this young woman and about God’s will concerning her. Still
deeply stirred by his talk, Emmy went several days later, on March 15, to visit
Frau Baehr and find out from her the way to “peace in God and in Christ.” And she
continued to attend the meetings.
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