“The First shall be Last, and the Last Shall be First”
Traditionally in Russia, people with Special Needs, as we today call them, played an integral part in the life of the village. Indeed, they were often regarded as holy- ‘God’s people’. However, we all know the story: how, in the course of just three or four generations all this changed. A mass exodus of people left the villages for the towns and cities, to take up jobs in industry and bureaucracy. There life was fast and unfriendly. People became sub-divided into an inordinate number of specialised sub-categories: engineers, teachers, government workers. The villages themselves in turn became subsumed in this process with collectivisation. In place of the eternal peasantry came tractor drivers, mechanics, agronomes etc. These simple people became lost in a complex and intellectual world. They did not have the ability to fit into any of the new categories of the industrial age, and so an additional one was created especially for them. They were labelled ‘invalid’, and dispatched in their millions to closed institutions, or simply left to a domestic life of unemployability.
This process was not unique to Russia. Something similar took place across the Western world (if not perhaps characterised by such extremes). Everywhere, the Twentieth Century witnessed the slow death of traditional village life, and accompanying this very often, an ostracisation of people who could not find a place in the new society.
When Karl Konig conceived the idea of recreating village life anew, in the form of life-sharing communities for people with Special Needs, it was therefore very much a deed against the current of the times. And yet, noone would have accused Konig of being a romantic, yearning for a lost age. On the contrary, he was an extremely practical and unsentimental man. He perceived that just such a setting would allow these special people to free themselves of the stigma of being labelled ‘invalid’ by the modern world.
The idea of the Camphill Village implied a return to a simple mode of life; to true community; and to a renewed connection with the cycles of nature, connected as they are to the Christian festivals. These simple people can find their place in such a society. They can relate to it and understand it on a heart level, instead of with the intellect demanded by modern life. In such settings, they can cease to be ‘invalids’, and instead take up the simple vocations of village life: ‘farmer’, ‘cook’, ‘gardener’ and ‘baker’. They have space to grow...to fulfill their potential. In fact, it was the dream of Konig that the villages might mature to the point where these people could begin to take possession of the village for themselves, so to speak. Almost 50 years after the first village was created, one can perceive that this ‘taking possession’ has to some extent occured. In many places these people are the stability, the conscience, and often the very soul of the village. And this is one of the defining features of a Camphill Village: that it seeks not so much to ‘cater’ for the person with Special Needs, but, as far as is possible, to empower them, to liberate their individual destinies.
Too often, we as so-called ‘co-workers’ in these villages fail to understand the full subtlety and depth of Konig’s vision. However, in one’s quieter and more humble moments, one can sometimes get a sense of it. If allowed to ‘blossom’, our ‘Villagers’ can become such full-blooded characters, and the relationships between them so warm and so genuine, that as a co-worker, one can almost feel at times as little more than a spectator on village life. It can almost seem as if we lead a mere shadow existence, alongside the brightness and richness of the lives of some of our villagers. In one’s stress and rush, one can at times feel quite small and petty in comparison. The point is surely that these simple, ‘holy’ people represent something truely human in a world that is fast losing its humanity....and that was Konig’s great insight!