This year my wife Virginia wrote our family letter, so I'm free to address those of you who know little of my current life outside of work. What I'd like to tell you about is Christmas Eve at Baker Branch; but in order to do so I need to tell you a little about our Neighborhood.
An Intentional Neighborhood
Baker Branch is 110 acres of rolling Virginia fields and woods, a neighborhood of eight households of friends, most of whom lived communally in Louisa at one time or another. Most of us, in fact, lived at Twin Oaks, an 80-member "egalitarian community" still located 3 miles from Baker Branch. [Note: In June of 1997 Twin Oaks, now with about 100 adults and 15 children, will celebrate it's 30th Anniversary. If you are interested in learning more about Twin Oaks, you can go to the community's website with a link I provide at the bottom of this letter.]
The land on which Baker Branch is now situated was in 1975 the site of a commune called "The Virginia Farm," a small branch of "The Farm," a large commune (1,500 members at its peak) in rural Tennessee which had a charismatic leader, Stephen Gaskin. (Stephen taught a brand of what he called "beatnik" spirituality, and he had led a large caravan of hippie-filled busses from San Francisco to Tennessee where they began one of the most ambitious communes of the day.) Although the Virginia Farm lasted only two years, when the group moved back to Tennessee one of the families remained behind and invited a group of us who were leaving Twin Oaks to join with them in buying the land.
It was back in 1975, also, that I first met Virginia, the woman who was seven years later to become my wife. Early that Spring she and a colorfully clad group of "hippies" swirled into Louisa County and began living together a few miles from Twin Oaks. They had moved as a group from Scituate (near Cape Cod) dressed in Ecuadorian charapa and white cotton pants (supplied by a member who was an importer by trade). Calling themselves "Walnut Hill," they worked hard at making and selling jewelry, wooden flutes and toys, and at cultivating a spiritual existence based on the yoga of Adono Lay, a charismatic ex-Jesuit chiropractor. They appeared t us to have an air of unhurried serenity. (Like many communes they were very able, in the sort run at least, to show outsiders only their best face.)
Many at Twin Oaks saw Walnut Hill members as too spiritual, too "hippie-dippie," and woefully short on feminist values (this last based more I suspect on image than on a comparison of ideas). To others of us they seemed exotically idealistic and refreshingly less pragmatic than we. We grew to know and feel warmly toward the Walnut Hill and Farm folks while attending meditations and celebrations together.
Today Baker Branch is made up of 7 families and 1 single man, and all but one of the fifteen adults are graduates of one of the above communities. I call us "graduates" because so many of us think of our commune years as periods of intense learning--learning especially about meetings. When nearly every decision, from taking a trip into town to having a baby, can be the subject of group discussion, one learns how to prepare for, attend, and hate meetings. This total immersion in group process, grueling though it sometimes was, did result in our learning more than a little about negotiating and more than a little about listening.
After being invited to purchase the Farm's land together, the original four families met monthly for over a year to devise common agreements for the neighborhood, agreements having to do with the mundane (splitting up the land and taking care of the road), the idealistic (specifying procedures for solving all interpersonal problems through group process rather than through litigation or violence), and the spiritual ("we wish to create an environment in which our children flourish spiritually as well as physically"). Though we have certainly not adhered as strictly to our agreements as we had hoped, they have allowed us to live (harmoniously for the most part) for eight years as intentional neighbors while Baker Branch doubled in size. The agreements have done so while requiring us to have, and this to many of us is the important part, only one meeting a year.
Christmas Eve at Baker Branch
Three of the households make up what I think of as my extended family. Living with me are Virginia, her 14 year-old daughter and 12 year-old son (Alycia and Arjana), and on weekends, my daughter Damia (also 14), who lives with her mother and her other family during the week. Their house is about 350 yards from ours, separated by a bit of woods and a corner of the Branch's 30 acre field. Living with Damia at her other household are her mother, stepfather, and two half brothers. The third household is made up of Alycia and Arjana's father, stepmother and stepsister.
This Christmas Eve, like the past 7 Christmas eves, our extended family gathered at one of the households for dinner, a ceremony, and gift giving. It is of the ceremony which I wish to tell you.
Six adults and six children sat together in front of a low table on which were six unlit candles and a crèche from which the baby Jesus was missing. I began by reading:
Legend has it that nearly 2,000 years ago a child was born, a child whose words and whose life would provoke a spiritual revolution. In a time when God was seen as vengefully righteous, Jesus Christ spoke of God as love, and of a faith characterized by charity, hope, peace, harmony, and the grace of god. "And the greatest of these," he said, "is love."
Jesus said that we should try to understand those who do not have faith in love, those who do not live by love's commandments. He said we should try to love and forgive them, to show by our example that loving is better than hating, that yielding is better than violence, and that peace is far superior to war. Many were so moved by Christ's words and example that they were willing to die rather than fight their governments' wars.
In a time when the world's leaders have at last a chance to substitute negotiation for warfare, we as believers in the words of Christ must each decide how we can work both to support those efforts and to bring into our own lives love, hope, charity, harmony, peace, and the grace of God.
At this point each adult read an aphorism about love, hope, etc., while the children took turns lighting the candles. The youngest child then lay the baby Jesus in the manger, and the youngest reader read a Golden Book version of Christ's birth. We completed the ceremony by singing a few carols and proceeding to the anxiously awaited giving of gifts.
Before the ceremony began, when the boys were grousing about having to "do that religious stuff" before opening the presents, I wondered briefly if we were making any impression at all on our children, whether there was any possible way of countering Christmas's commercialism. The next evening, however, while Damia and I were walking the dogs, she told me that she and Alycia had decided that they would do the ceremony with their children so that they would see that Christmas is more than opening presents.
I hope that you have enjoyed reading about this bit of communal history and about our attempts to carry some of our ideals into the '80's; and I hope that I'll hear from you about your life and your ideals.
Afterward
I did receive a lot of positive response to the letter, with many telling of their own efforts to carry out their youthful ideals. A few people corrected parts of the ceremony. One friend, for example, pointed out that it wasn't Jesus who said, "And the greatest of these is love," but rather, one of the gospel writers. Another friend said that depicting the pre-Christian God as vengeful was inaccurate, that there were more pacific sides to the Judaic conception of God.
I was encouraged by the response to write other "Winter Holiday Letters." Last year's letter is posted on this website within the page on The Church of the Whimsical Way. This year I wrote as my letter Tai Chi and Striking Bag Meditation.
By the way, if you want to find out more about Twin Oaks Community, you can visit them in cyberspace and find out a lot about them, including about how you could visit in person.
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