Let Our Power Be Dismantled
I suppose that in some way I have been going through a small spiritual crisis. Nothing new, only the usual crisis and struggle, a little more intensified by the “fiftieth year.” Still it is getting to be quite decisive because there are fewer evasions possible. As I go on, the ways of escape are progressively closed, renounced, or otherwise abandoned. I know now that I am really committed to stability here, and that even the thought of temporary travel is useless and vain. I know that my contacts with others of like mind by mail, etc., are relatively meaningless, though they may have some raison d’être. I know that my writing solves nothing for me personally and that it has created some problems which are still unresolved. I know there is nothing to be solved or settled by any special arrangement within the framework of the community. That my position is definitely ambiguous and my job is to accept this with the smallest possible amount of bad faith.
Reading the little book by Eberhard Arnold on the Bruderhof. I think this (from his statement on his fiftieth birthday) applies well enough to be almost a word of God to me: “Let us pledge to him that all our own power will remain dismantled and will keep on being dismantled among us. Let us pledge that the only thing that will count among us will be the power and authority of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; that it will never again be us that count but that God above will rule and govern in Christ and the Holy Spirit.”
June 2, 1964, V.107-8
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