Today's Bruderhof - for Ange

Children are living beings—more living than adults, who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love. It must be an ashram where men have gathered for the highest end of life, in the peace of nature; where life is not merely meditative, but fully awake in its activities; where children’s minds are not being perpetually drilled into believing that the idolatry of their nation is the truest ideal for them to accept; where they are bidden to realize man’s world as God’s kingdom, to whose citizenship they have to aspire; where the sunrise and sunset and the silent glory of stars are not daily ignored; where nature’s festivities of flowers and fruit have their joyous recognition; and where the young and the old, the teacher and the student, sit at the same table to take their daily food and the food of their eternal life.