The Angel in the Dining Room (2002)

The Angel in the Dining Room
David B. Schwartz

Dedicated to the memory of Hubert Zipperlen, 1911 - 2002

To us, as students of Rudolf Steiner, the child -whatever his mental condition may be -is more than his physical appearance may indicate. He is more than his body, more than his emotions, more than his spoken or unspoken words. He is even more than his achievements. In his appearance he is merely the outer shell of an infinite and eternal spiritual being.”
- Karl Köenig

We were getting ready for dinner when Bob saw the angel in the dining room. We were at Camphill Village, a community where people with mental retardation and others of us with less visible disabilities live together. Susan was at the stove when Bob reached out and touched both of us. He gestured mutely toward the corner, by the window overlooking the woods. He pointed toward the angel.

Bob is what I consider an intuitive, which is at the root of his uncanny ability to make contact with deeply disturbed autistic children. But I had come to recognize him as something even more unusual than that - a mystic. He was so sensitive that he picked up things out of the ether. I had a patient like that. As psychologically disturbed as she was, there were certain experiences and perceptions of hers that simply could not be explained by psychology. She simply “saw” them and they were there.

Bob was trembling and his words were caught on his tongue. He looked like a man who had not so much as seen a ghost, but was seeing one at that very moment. She was tall, he whispered slowly, describing what he was seeing as he averted his eyes and looked back for another frightening glance. She filled the corner to the high ceiling. She had long yellow hair, was gowned in flowing robes, and held a scroll in her hands. She looked beatifically and protectively over the scene of the people with disabilities setting the table. Her presence had something to do with them, he knew -the scroll with Susan and me, and our being in that place. I felt something -was it simply psychological contamination, or true mysterium tremendum?

For it seemed that I almost sensed the rustle of the angel’s wings, that sound in the old testament that brought unbelievers to their knees. “My Lord!,” I said to Bob, later, walking him down to the front door. “I sure am glad that I don’t see angels. I’m quite frightened enough as it is!”

After fifteen years of visiting Camphill Village, the closest of a hundred sister intentional communities around the globe, I had finally come to stay for a whole two weeks. Instead of just being a visitor, Susan and I were houseparents. We had a family: not just our own children, but Mike and Michael and Ben and Posey. It was around their table, become temporarily ours, that we gathered for meals. We recited grace, a blessing from anthroposophy, the transcendental philosophy created by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner almost a century ago. Our daughter, Stephanie, eight, spoke:

Sun, earth, water, and air,
Have wrought with God’s care
That the plants live and bear:
Thanking God for this food
In truth live we would
Bearing Beauty and Good.

We reached out and joined hands around the table and pronounced the final
ritual together: “Blessings on the meal.”

Then we ate. The vegetable dishes, carefully prepared by Susan despite the heat of the kitchen in the July heat wave in a village without the modern industrial comfort of air-conditioning, were savory. We had walked down to the garden barns with our cart just that morning, to pick up our allotment of just-picked vegetables from the biodynamic farm along the slopes of French creek. We passed clover fields luxurious with grazing cows, each with their names. Other villagers and co-workers like us tended the cows in the dairy.

The cows, unlike on most farms, retained their horns. This was because of biodynamic farming. Biodynamics was another fruit of Steiner’ s work, like the Waldorf school across the creek and its thousands of sisters, like anthroposophic medicine, and architecture, and other fields. In anthroposophic farming, cows kept their horns. The horns, I was eventually to figure out, had something to do with the unseen world, in which such beings as angels were said to reside over something as earthly as a cow-pasture.

Our family and work were not about any unseen world. They were about the seen world -the world of gardens, and cows, and houses between which one could walk. And a large part of the seen world, although in a quite different way than anything I had encountered in my thirty years in the field of developmental disabilities, were the people with disabilities themselves. At Camphill, there was no apartheid between such people and those who cared for them.

Here, as in all Camphill communities, no-one was paid. One simply made a life together. Early each morning, Mike, who rose early, walked down to the cow barn to bring back our freshly-filled pail of milk. Michael went down to the front step of our old mansion to bring up his Philadelphia Inquirer and read the scores of his teams, legs crossed on the couch, looking very much like an ordinary man reading the sports section before work. It was Susan who told me, eventually, that he could not read.

After breakfast dishes were washed, people, including me and Stephanie, went off to our day’ s work. I pulled out my tools and started installing a ceiling fan to stir the hot air in the dining room. Stephanie helped her new friend Alexandria pull a wagon around the village ªgatherª up all the little children from their houses for a morning’ s babysitting in the yard of Oberlin house, down the woods path from our home. Herbie showed up to chop the fresh vegetables for Susan for lunch. Sandy went right to the sink and began to energetically wash the breakfast dishes. Ross pulled out the vacuum cleaner and set about vacuuming the stairway inch by inch, just as he had done yesterday. And Jean, semi-retired but ironing a tablecloth, filled Susan in on all important events of everyone in the village since the day before. Sooner than we had imagined possible, we settled into the rhythms of an ordinary life. More rhythmic and more ordinary, in fact, than anything we had ever known.

Friendship

As days went on in that hot July, we came unexpectedly to feel as if we had found a home. Susan slipped into being a happy housemother at the center of a large home so beautifully that she started to glow, like a plant finally rooted in nourishing soil. I felt happy myself. I was living again in my life fully on foot, living in community, which I have pursued all of my life. We fell in love with the “villagers” there -and clearly, they with us. Every morning, as I rose early, as Mike appeared with the milk pail, making strange remarks to the air and wandering about outside, as Michael assumed the posture of the sports-reading businessman, Ben wandered in rubbing his sleepy eyes.

Ben was the quintessence of a man with Down’s syndrome; sweet, affectionate, acutely emotionally sensitive to rejection or anger at him, with the typical enlarged tongue of Down’s syndrome which made his speech thick and difficult to comprehend without practice. Down’s syndrome, the great founder of Camphill Dr. Karl Köenig said, was a fairly recent phenomenon in the world evolution. On a planet ever more self-destructively estranged from feeling, people with Down’s syndrome had appeared as an attempted corrective. They were all feeling . Now, of course, there was amniocentesis and abortion, and people with Down’s syndrome were disappearing. This comment of Dr. König was typically anthroposophic, in suggesting the largest possible view of a seemingly immediate phenomenon. Maybe he was right.

Surely Ben was a most positive influence on our often-challenging and
difficult to understand Stephanie. Stephanie, like the modern world, seemed a kind of a fascinatingly bright child version of Bill Gates. We presumed she would be very successful, but hoped that she would be able to enjoy relationships with others as an adult. We had tried constant explanation, exhortation, punishment -it was sometimes as if we were explaining human feeling to someone from Mars. In a week, Ben changed all that.

Ben and Stephanie immediately struck up a friendship. In many ways, they were at a similar level of emotional maturity. Soon our very “un-touchy” girl was hugging. They hugged good morning, they hugged goodnight, they played pretend games with Susan’ s stuffed animal, Buster, who became the house scapegoat for all trouble and bad behavior. They were inseparable, they were joyous. I had never seen Stephanie like this, and it was good.

Much to our astonishment, this change extended to us. This little girl who always wanted to be at a distance even from her mother, who objected to her mother even walking her into nursery school at three, began to crawl into her lap. She even started crawling into mine. Crucially, she seemed to penetrate the mystery of others’ feelings. Perhaps this was because Ben, with his fluid, open face, was as expressive as a mime. When he was happy, he smiled broadly. When he heard something that displeased him, he cried -real tears. In him maybe Stephanie could see what people felt.

Soon Susan made a close friend, a woman named Susie who came to help in the house. At first glance, I thought her to be quite cognitively impaired. She seem to say much. But then Susan started telling me of the many sotto voce observations Susie made over the course of a day. She was acutely observant, it turned out. She missed nothing, whether it was the peculiarities of our visiting friends, who somehow seemed far more impaired in the ability for human sharing and civility than the members of our new family. And all were related with a sympathetic, dry wit that made Susan, who has a similar sharply-observant but forgiving temperament, feel that she had found a friend.

One night Susan was talking on the phone with her mother, and her mother asked what she thought Susie’ diagnosis” Perhaps Susan should find it out and read up on it, so that she could best help her. Maybe I knew. After all, I was supposed to be a psychologist and developmental disabilities specialist. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she turned to me in bed, where I was reading. “ What did I think Susie’ diagnosis was?” she queried. “
Susie? I asked, looking up. “Humorist.”

My own deepest friend became Michael, the day he showed me his basement workshop. It was clear that he was both hesitant and very much wanted me to see it. The hesitancy only came of his fear of being rebuffed, that I would tell him I was too busy. “ Maybe tomorrow?” he asked me, while I was up on a ladder hanging a ceiling fan to at least move around the stuffy air. “ about right now? I replied, climbing down the ladder and setting down my electrical tools. I followed him into the basement. What I saw there in Michael’ s workshop was almost enough to make me cry. For I had entered into my grandfather’s workshop, and my uncles’ workshop. Even, to tell the truth, my own.

Everywhere Michael’s beloved tools hung in exquisite order. Screwdrivers ranked in racks. Saws hung from nails. Hammers of all sizes and types ranged across the walls, below sections of scrap wood carefully sorted by size. Wooden boxes of carefully straightened out and rusty used common nails were tacked to the front of his bench within ready reach. There was not a bit of dirt, or disorder, not a thing out of place. Among this sublime order I felt like a child in my grandfather’ workshop, my grandfather who also would never throw away a nail he could straighten. I still use his tin nail-boxes soldered out of discarded Prince Albert tobacco tins, although I could not claim such grandfatherly order as Michael. Were my grandfather to appear, it would be Michael’ s workshop, above my own, that would win his silent acknowledgement that all was as a workshop should be.

Against the power of this setting, there was only one thing missing: the ability to know how to use these tools to build something. Michael was painfully aware of this lack. It was that that he needed me for, he told me. To help him figure out what to do. In the center of the space was a recently-attempted project, a new workbench. It leaned down precipitously at one end. Michael knew that something hadn’t turned out quite right, but couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. He hadn’t a clue.

I had spent the last weeks -and years -dealing with the countless people without mental retardation who cross one’ s path in the world who didn’t have a clue, either. But what they lacked clues about were elemental things that were central to the knowledge of my well-raised, profoundly ethical friend. Someone who knew, also, what it to be a friend; what it was to subsume one’s own egotistic strivings freely to concern for the loving well-being of the other. To take one’ s greatest pleasure in life not from narcissistic self-gratification of all the tedious types; power, money, sexual conquest, and the pleasures of murder: personal, spiritual, environmental, global -but in “ seeing the other grow more beautiful, because we were together.”

My sickness with the latest of disappointing human beings spread across the surface of the earth in this latest, only minimally successful incarnate learning opportunity, had succeeded in opening my heart and eyes. Michael and I stood in the tidy workshop and I realized that in truth he was becoming beautiful to me and that unquestionably - he did not hide himself behind some persona - I was becoming beautiful to him. It was clear that we both sensed in each other qualities of honesty, and of faithfulness. We had been disappointed. And, happily, we had something to give each other. I took a tape measure and quickly determined the height discrepancy of the sides, pieced and marked an extension, and handed Michael the nails to bang into place. Then we rocked it on its side. It was perfect. We celebrated. You’re pretty smart, Michael Bernstein! ”he exclaimed happily. “ Yes, you are,” I agreed. Then we went upstairs to dinner.

Many years ago, I first puzzled over why Camphill afforded better lives to people than any lavishly-funded professional program I had ever seen. I read somewhere a founder pointing out that Camphill was not created as a service program for people with mental retardation. It was a community for everyone. The Camphill founders wished to live in community, and realized that it would be necessary to have people with mental retardation present in order to have it. I at last understood this.

At this time, we slowly became aware that the villagers that we had gotten to know and who had become our friends were recruiting us. They were straightforward: “ You have to move to the village and be our houseparents.” when you move here, I’ m going to work in your house.” They asked about school for Stephanie, and for Nate. With the immediacy of people with mental retardation, some people were packed up and ready to move. In with us. When we left, Michael told me that he was going to go down into his workshop and cry. All this made us pause to wonder if what we had conceived as a summer working vacation might be in fact a call to a new life. This possibility was as unsettling as seeing an angel in one’s dining room.

Back in the World

Once released from social restraints by modernization, however, [Illich claims] a disembedded economy proved to be a relentless force, one that dismantled traditional societies piece by piece. The innumerable and varied ways that people got by and got along were replaced with a life of dependency on commodities...
- Eugene Burkhart

No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma
of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”
- Ivan Illich

When I got back home from Camp Hill, it seemed as if the dump had caught on fire. Suburban sprawl was steadily expanding, even in the intolerable and exhaust-choked heat. Heavy equipment had leveled what had been a woods only when we left into stripped subsoil ready for an asphalt parking lot. People plowed through the choked atmosphere in air-conditioned automotive bubbles, passing from one cool, bright, windowless big box store to another, a flat sun hanging heavy in the orange sky.
Returning to Hershey after the time in Camphill was like returning to an inner-city tenement after a summer as a fresh-air kid. What was marginally tolerable before now seemed unbearable in comparison.

This is of course the way that change takes place; you get a glimpse outside of your existing situation, and the polarity of experience heightens the contrast so much that it motivates you to take steps toward a new possibility rather than put up with the old. I am always encouraged when I see this with one of my patients. That's when they start moving, albeit with struggle and difficulty. So it was with us: we had left our summer big family and community, the village one walked on foot on paths through the fields and woods, the life so demanding that one fell into bed tired out every night, looking forward to the next day, for a suburban America where one sees faces through the glass of minivans, driving through the blighted landscape of modernity. It was enough to give you the bends.


Dr. Köenig’s vision.

A few years ago I had stood on the site of the first Camphill, overlooking the River Dee on “ Camp Hill” in northern Scotland near Aberdeen, the ancient hill once site to the Northward-thrusting Roman legions. It had been more than fifty years then since Dr. Köenig had come to this place. It was here that he and his colleagues, a group of young physicians and friends fleeing the Nazi holocaust, had made their lonely stand against the forces of darkness by planting “ a candle on a hill.” In company with handicapped children they on that remote hill sought to found a transcendentally -inspired community just as their home Europe was burning in Hitlerian destruction and murder. The
candle lit by those pioneers had burned brightly and had spread throughout the world. Now each stood on their own hills, in contrast to the modern incarnations of evil which were once more gobbling up the world.

It was materialism -the belief that the world was merely matter, a modern form of the ancient sin of hubris, that was destroying the earth. The other six of the ever-present seven deadly sins were, as always, flourishing too. Camphill and anthroposophy’s key contribution, it seems to me, were in trying to break what William James called “ the reign of hardness” in viewing the world. The world was more than “stuff, and people were more than the shells of their exteriors - even people with disabilities. They were a divine mystery. The earth itself was a divine mystery, to be treated with reverence. And there was a way to perceive the divine, to see the world as transcendent and holy, rather than as a site and as consumers for another Wal-Mart.

Bob, when he came into our home and saw the angel, was such a person who could see things -a mystic. But he perceived transcendental aspects of the world with his heart only. He could read the scroll, however. It had to do with me and Susan, and our linked destiny with the people there, he told me. More than that he could not say, he said: such messages are never specific, but rather dropped into one’ s heart to be worked out in one’ s own way.

But he was sure that the angel’s visit and message was about us somehow, and this place. Rudolf Steiner, in contrast to Bob, brought both mystical intuition and a disciplined intellect to the project of seeing the unseen world. The difference was illustrated by my late friend Hubert Zipperlen, who used the example of someone who could perceive auras around people and who said that someone who had a lot of green in her aura, so “he was good with plants.” Just seeing a color in an aura, he pointed out, had nothing whatsoever to do with knowing what that might mean, people at Camphill quietly try to perceive things beyond matter. When Hubert worked in his garden, he talked with the elemental beings who brought growth to vegetables. Water sprites found a home in streams and flow-forms. And most importantly, everyone strove to see the “ infinite being” in each person with a handicap passing through this life. As Köenig
wrote:

We are convinced that every human being has his individual existence not only here on earth between birth and death, but that every child was a spiritual entity before he was born, and that every man will continue to live after he has passed through the gate of death. Thus any kind of physical or mental handicap is not acquired by chance or misfortune. It has a definite meaning for the individual and is meant to change his life.”

The presence of people with disabilities was an opportunity to not only them, but each of us. Perhaps my own handicaps, then, against which I had struggled so long, had meaning as well. Perhaps they had meaning in changing my life. In considering the core passing from incarnation to incarnation in myself and in all those around me I had an opportunity to see the world become alive, transcendent, holy. And even the cows and the fields could keep their horns because the possibility that they might gore other livestock was far outweighed by their importance as antennae bringing cosmic forces into the farm. So I decided to stand, myself, poking my own horns tentatively into the world beyond matter, standing out on a hillock under the stars among the cows, hearing their low mooing in the shadows. What might I discover in such a strange and powerful place? What did the angel’s scroll say about Susan and me, and the company of these people? Maybe, we decided, we should find out.


August, 2002