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LITR 5439 Literary & Historical Utopias
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2nd Research Post 2013
Kristine Vermillion
July 5, 2013
L’Abri Christian Fellowship
“Every smallest village had its temple, and in those
gracious retreats sat wise and noble women, quietly busy at some work of their
own until they were wanted, always ready to give comfort, light, or help, to any
applicant.” (Herland 10.13)
“They applied their minds to the thought of God, and
worked out the theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression. They
lived as if God was real and at work within them.” [10.69]
We have looked at several
historical utopian type communities throughout the semester, and for the most
part none of them appear to have any link to the Christian Church at large. The
ones that do have a religious component seem to be more cultish and extremist.
While studying the Kibbutz Movement I was surprised
by how few of the kibbutz were based on religion. Most of them were secular in
their make-up and chided any religious component. Yet the utopian dream is a
fundamentally philosophical and religious undertaking. The presence of both
millennial and garden themes automatically link it with the Scriptural ideal,
and the underlying desire to build a community that takes care of the needs of
all of its citizens all the time and solving the societal problems in the
process is not anti-Christian. In general the Christian church seems to have
embraced the doctrine of the individual and capitalism to such an extreme that
the example of the second chapter of Acts has come to naught in practical
application, at least as far as I can tell. However, I recently came across a
ministry called “L’Abri Christian Fellowship,” and it offers something quite
different from the typical Christian fellowship that I am familiar with.
In 1955 Francis and Edith Schaeffer turned their
home in the Swiss Alps into a community home. They named it “L’Abri,” which is
French for “shelter.” Their desire was to create a place for people to come
where they could live in community and develop relationships and provide a safe
place for people to discuss philosophical ideas and religious beliefs. The
Schaeffer family eventually began to host “students” from all around the world
of all faiths and nationalities. The students would live with them and help out
with all the work to maintain the place. They would dine together, and the
Schaeffers made themselves available to talk to the students about whatever they
wanted to talk about. They offered no classes per se, but they did encourage
personal study and suggested reading materials. There was no schedule that the
students had to adhere to. They just worked on living together peacefully and
fostering relationships so that honest intellectual discussions could take place
in a safe atmosphere. The official description of the community is:
L'Abri Fellowship
began in Switzerland in 1955 when Francis and Edith Schaeffer decided in faith
to open their home to be a place where people might find satisfying answers to
their questions and practical demonstration of Christian care. It was called
L'Abri, the French word for "shelter," because they sought to provide a shelter
from the pressures of a relentlessly secular 20th century. As time went by, so
many people came that others were called to join the Schaeffers in their work,
and more branches were established.
The experiment was so well received that they expanded their
original site and others like it were established all over the world. The
official site lists similar communities in England, Holland, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, Sweden, Canada, Korea, Germany, Australia and Brazil. Students,
Families and others still travel to these locations to stay and live for varying
amounts of time.
In the Wikipedia article it
states: “L’Abri is not a retreat, a commune, or a seminary, although it
incorporates elements of all of these.” The official website offers the
following description of what their community looks like:
Each branch is staffed by one or more L’Abri families and
single people, called "workers", who look after those who come and stay—"students." In addition to the residential work, L’Abri workers are involved in
conferences, public speaking, and some are committed to book-writing projects.
Students may be living in the houses of the workers and/or having many of their
meals with them. Although each branch is essentially a study centre, life is
informal and personal. A typical day is divided into half a day of study and
half a day of helping with practical work—cooking, cleaning, gardening etc.
Meal times often involve lengthy discussion centered on a topic of concern to a
particular student or worker. Some evenings are given over to lectures, films
and bible studies.
The L'Abri
community operates as an extended family type arrangement. However, over the
years the branches have become more like retreat centers, similar to the
development of the kibbutz movement’s progression into the retreat center model.
However, temporary guests are expected to work alongside the longer term
“students” throughout their stay and participate in the overall community
experience.
Francis
Schaeffer was an American Evangelical Christian, Presbyterian minister,
Christian humanist, philosopher and prolific writer who was opposed to
theological modernism, i.e. liberal theology. He was also anti-consumer
Christianity with its high-pressure sales techniques of evangelism. He was
grieved by the lack of community and fellowship in the church and the lack of
development of the minds of the church in general. Frank Schaeffer—son and
critic of his father—claimed that Francis loved the arts and literature even
more than theology and doctrine. He seems to have written about everything.
However, issues that pertain to our study of Utopian literature include the
problem with pollution, the question of man as an individual, an individual’s
role as a member of society, and our present society and dystopian trends. The
titles that contain these ideas include,
Pollution and the
Death of Man, How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?,
and
A Christian
Manifesto. Schaeffer passed away in 1985, but
his work continues. Several prominent leaders and teachers out there today are
former participants in the L'Arbi community, a group that presently includes Os
Guinness and scholar James K. A. Smith. The reception of his works has garnered
a large following similar to the popularity of Ayn Rand.
Edith Schaffer, who passed away at the
age of 98 earlier this year, was also a writer and speaker. One of her books
titled The
Hidden Art of Homemaking speaks to the issues of
daily life that utopian fiction also deals with. The chapter titles of her book
are: The First Artist, What is Hidden Art?, Music, Painting, Sketching and
Sculpturing, Interior Decoration, Gardens and Gardening, Flower Arrangements,
Food, Writing—Prose and Poetry, Drama, Creative Recreation, Clothing,
Integration, and Environment. From a cursory glance, her emphasis on the arts
and recreation resembles Callenbach's in
Ecotopia,
which observes, "There is hardly a young person in the whole country who doesn't
either play an instrument, dance, act, sing, write, sculpt, paint, make
video-films, or indulge in some original artistic activity. However, few of
these gain the recognition—and sales—to sustain themselves entirely through
their work" (Callenbach 133).
She encouraged people to develop all their
skills and creativity in everything, and to not do it to become famous, but to
do it for the personal and community pleasure it provides. Like Callenbach, the
Schaeffer's were also very concerned about the environment and the unintended
consequences of human degradation of the land.
The Schaeffer's intentional style of
living their faith and fellowshipping with people resembles the description that
Gillman gives of the ideal religion in
Herland.
The following two excerpts from Gilman closely resemble the L'Abri style.
“Patience, gentleness, courtesy, all that we call ‘good
breeding,’ was part of their code of conduct. But where they went far beyond us
was in the special application of religious feeling to every field of life. They
had no ritual, no little set of performances called ‘divine service,’ save those
religious pageants I have spoken of, and those were as much educational as
religious, and as much social as either. But they had a clear established
connection between everything they did—and God. Their cleanliness, their health,
their exquisite order, the rich peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness
of the children, and above all the constant progress they made—all this was
their religion.” (10.68)
“Here
was a religion which gave to the searching mind a rational basis in life, the
concept of an immense Loving Power working steadily through them toward good. It
gave to the ‘soul’ that sense of contact with the inmost force, of perception of
the uttermost purpose, which we always crave. It gave to the ‘heart’ the blessed
feeling of being loved, loved and UNDERSTOOD. It gave clear, simple, rational
directions as to how we should live—and why. And for ritual it gave first those
triumphant group demonstrations, when with a union of all the arts, the
revivifying combination of great multitudes moved rhythmically with march and
dance, song and music, among their own noblest products and the open beauty of
their groves and hills. Second, it gave those numerous little centers of wisdom
where the least wise could go to the most wise and be helped.” [10.72]
The L'Abri communities situated around the globe function as
little safe centers of wisdom to which people can go to study, think, converse
and participate in communities of caring, intelligent people. It is an
interesting concept. It also helps that these communities seem to be located in
pristine lands and surrounded by beautiful gardens thereby functioning as
centers for advocating aesthetics and beauty.
There are many similarities between the utopian
works and this community, however in its worldview they are fundamentally
opposed. L'Abri is an overtly Christian ministry, and its statement of faith and
doctrines preclude the ideas and hypotheses of Gilman’s, Rand’s, and
Callenbach's works. They are diametrically opposed to their ideas and are a
force to be reckoned with. However, it is interesting to observe the same type
communal and work patterns and environmental concerns that utopian communities
promote scattered throughout such diverse places.
The following are resources and links that are
related to L'Abri.
Schaeffer, Edith.
The Hidden Art of Homemaking: Creative Ideas for Enriching
Everyday Life. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House
Publishers, 1971.
Schaeffer,
Francis A. The Complete Works of Francis A.
Schaeffer. Vol. 1-5. Wheator, IL: Crossway
Books, 1982.
Includes:
Escape from Reason, Back to Freedom and Dignity, No Little
People, Death in the City, The Great Evangelical Disaster, Pollution and the
Death of Man, How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?,
and
A Christian Manifesto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Abri
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7sK4x_dwwc
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/march/36.60.html
http://sheridanvoysey.com/what-i-found-at-swiss-labri/
Works Cited
Callenback, Ernest.
Ecotopia. Berkeley, CA:
Heyday Books, 1975, 2004.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins.
Herland. (1915). Literary
and Historical Utopias Website for Dr. Craig White.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/UtopTexts/herland/herland.htm
http://www.labri.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Abri
