Dear Brother Steiner

By Linda Williams

Recently Linda was one of several asked to share her thoughts on her relationship to Rudolf Steiner at the Commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his death. What follows is a letter she wrote to Brother Steiner, noting the impact he has had on her life. As she explained to the audience during the celebration, her salutation of “Brother” Steiner is meant to recognize and involve him as family, as well as an academic.

Dear Brother Steiner,

When I was asked if I would say a few words about you on this 100 th anniversary of your physical departure from this Earth, I was both honored and grateful for a chance to reflect on the impact you have had on my life and so many others, especially in the North American context from which I come.

How does an African American woman-child from the American industrialized Midwest, come into relationship with an Austrian-German spiritual teacher whose earthly presence departed 33 years before she was even born? What might they have in common? How do they enter into conversation? What distances must they cross in order to hear each other? I marvel as I think about the life journeys that have brought us into each other’s sphere.

Brother Steiner, when you landed this last time in 1861 in Kraljevic, a tiny village during the time of the dissolving of Austro-Hungarian Empire, I think of the karmic stream being prepared for my generation’s entry across the ocean in Detroit, Michigan, a large urban city that was growing in the light and shadow of American Empire.

On my mother’s side, when you were born, Brother Steiner, my great-grandpa Henry (1854 to 1933) was seven years old. He had just traveled with his Mother Eliza and sisters from slavery in the southern state of Kentucky to freedom in Michigan, a free northern state in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We don’t know if Mother Eliza and her children were liberated by the one who owned them – or if they escaped on their own. But we do know that Mother Eliza traveled with the three children she had been allowed to keep –out of the 12 children she had birthed in bondage. My great-grandfather, the youngest of the three, was able to experience freedom for nearly his entire life.

They landed in Detroit where they became part of a small community of free-born Blacks and those who had been freed either by slaveowners or themselves. Great-grandpa Henry grew up to become a respected member of this community in Detroit. Because of Detroit’s proximity to Canada, Grandpa Henry and his family helped to sustain the Underground Railroad: A network of safe houses and transportation routes that supported the passage of escaping enslaved individuals across the Detroit River to Canada. Henry, even as a child, worked with comrades and parishioners in the Second Baptist Church, Michigan’s oldest Black congregation. After slavery was abolished in the United States during the Civil War, Grandpa Henry became a civil servant – a postman – probably the first person of color hired by the miniscule post office (there were only eight postmen at the time in the relatively small city of Detroit). He was a deacon in the church, and when he died, he was honored as the oldest Mason of Color in Michigan.

My great-grandmother, Josephine, Henry’s wife, was from a family descended from free-born and enslaved Blacks that intermarried with the Algonquin Nehantic tribal nation in a strategy employed to hold on to indigenous land (during the 18 th and 19 th century, some free-born Blacks were allowed to buy land; indigenous people could not). Located in colonial times on the Eastern seaboard (Connecticut and Rhode Island region of the young United States), Josephine’s family had begun migrating west to Michigan and further in the 1800s. It was in Detroit, at Second Baptist Church, that industrious Henry probably met beautiful Josephine, and they were married.

Grandparents Henry and Josephine were contemporaries of you, Brother Steiner, and each of them outlived you by a few years. But they were there, just like you, completing their karmic tasks in preparation for the generations that would enter the streams after them.

I tell you these brief accounts because I can already trace in this ancestral lineage that a place for Spirit was being prepared and held for later generations. Like you at this time, Brother Steiner, Spirit and culture and community reigned supreme in their lives during the cataclysmic years between the American Civil War, World War I, and the rise and fall of empires. I admire how you sought to awaken so many others to the world of Spirit through your work, breathing life into new impulses and making connections across cultures.

Other karmic connections in my life’s journey led me to a yearning that I recognized as a child and carried into young adulthood: A desire to understand more about what lies beyond the world as presented to me in sense perception and thought. Brother Steiner, I found out later that you named this feeling in the first Leading Thought : Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.

It was this hunger and thirst that I sought to satisfy through my participation in the various spiritual and cultural portals of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and the world, as I was trying to penetrate what it meant to be a spiritual human being in the world.

When I was a young woman already in college, one of my younger cousins enrolled in the fourth grade at the Detroit Waldorf School. Already pursuing an alternative path in the social sciences at Michigan State University, I was intrigued with what I was hearing about my cousin’s experiences at the Detroit Waldorf School. I found opportunities to attend several of the assemblies and festivals over the four years my cousin attended the school. During this time, I became a social worker in an agency that served neurodiverse persons who were released from the state hospital system and were housed now in small neighborhood group homes. As my cousin graduated from Detroit Waldorf and began attending a local public high school, I looked further into the Waldorf world. To me, it seemed that there was something lively and engaging in my cousin’s experience that could also be helpful to the neurodiverse people I was serving. Questions began to energetically emerge for me: What is a human being? And further: How do we serve this human being in each other?

To my surprise, I found that there was a Waldorf teacher training program nearby. The Waldorf Institute, led by Werner and Barbara Glas, Hans and Rosemary Gebert, Janet McGavin, Adola and Charles McWilliams, and many others, had begun in 1967 and was then located in suburban Detroit, renting space in a Franciscan friary. It was in this space that I met you, Dr. Steiner.

Despite the suggestion made by Hans Gebert in the interview process that I might want to “read a little Rudolf Steiner” before I began my classes in the Fall,

I decided to not read, but rather to watch and listen. Part of the reason was that I felt I had read enough, having dabbled in metaphysics in the form of New Thought Christianity, Rosicrucian literature, and some work related to theosophy. I guess a part of me was overconfident – I considered myself well-read. But also I was curious to approach this new experience leading with something other than my intellect.

So my introduction to Rudolf Steiner was first through my heart and my will when I stepped into the Waldorf Institute of Mercy College (now Sunbridge Institute).

I met you, dear Dr. Steiner, by the fruit of your work –first in a school for youngsters and then in an institute for adults. And even though the first book assigned to be read was Theosophy , it was the community that awakened me, and it was through the community that I feel like I truly met you. I joined about 30 other seekers or aspirants, if you will, in what I now see as a cooperative school for the Spirit.

Along with the erudite learning that happened with reading and studying Theosophy, Occult Science, Philosophy of Freedom, and Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment , I also learned to spin and knit wool, carefully paint with watercolors, sculpt with clay, move in eurythmy, and listen to fairy tales. I performed in the Oberufer plays with Barbara Renold directing, and sang in chorus (even once on the Goetheanum stage) with Dina Winter. I remember that Hans Gebert thought my coloring of my projective drawings was so bright that he hung them over the classroom door, and said they reminded him of the “The Guardian of the Threshold.” During Hilmar Moore’s course on the Evolution of Consciousness, I joined classmates as we performed as aristocrats during the French Revolution, complete with dresses and wigs borrowed from the University’s theater shop.

I stayed at the Institute for many years as I gathered certifications for state teaching, Waldorf teaching, and a Master’s degree. More importantly, I sat at the feet of so many wise teachers who had penetrated your work that I was inspired even to be in their presence. In addition to those named already, I must mention Henry Barnes, Virginia Sease, Michaela Glöckler, Rosemary Bergman, Dennis Klocek, Carlos Pietzner, Betty Staley, and Chris and Signe Schaefer.

I consider my sojourn at the Waldorf Institute one of the most important periods in my life. It was there that you became Brother Steiner to me because you were such a part of the community at the Institute.

Somehow, the other students, the faculty, and the guest speakers made you whole for me and brought me into relationship with you as a fellow seeker, but also a conversation partner and counselor. You remain accessible to me, even when I don’t quite understand your words or when I tire from reading translations of the 19th century German grammar in which you write and speak. But what I have learned over the years is that much of what you brought – from your own research, from direct revelations, from your own inner activity –was fodder for my own contemplation and composting. The less I took you for granted – meaning the more I worked with your work and didn’t just accept it at face value – the more I had to explore in inner meditation, deliberation, and research.

You walked with me, Brother Steiner, and opened doors and paths I didn’t know were there. I learned to teach, mainly because I learned to learn in deeper ways at the Waldorf Institute, and under the tutelage and example of fellow anthroposophists at Detroit Waldorf, Urban Waldorf, and the wider Waldorf movement. When my nephew was born with Down’s Syndrome and was able to experience Camphill Beaver Run from 8 th to 12 th grade, you showed me through another anthroposophical community how to care for our most vulnerable. When my loved ones crossed the threshold, you taught me how to hold them and nourish them with love and attention.

Your guidance led me to see how the Divine Sofia and the Cosmic Christ could accompany us all on this earthly path and helped me to attend to the souls in my care as a teacher, colleague, and friend. Through study groups, artistic work, and my meditative life, I stayed in conversation with you. And as I studied further and joined the Anthroposophical Society, and later the School of Spiritual Science and then the Pedagogical Section, I remain a faithful researcher and student of anthroposophy, especially in these dizzying times when opposing forces have become so strong.

I have retired from the classroom now, but not from anthroposophical engagement, study, and contemplation. I still engage with you through the communities in which I am a part, and I work with many others to understand how both the spiritual and practical aspects of anthroposophy can be part of facing the burning issues of today, as well as the history and future of the human being. I met anthroposophy through the human beings who lived it deeply in their being. I strive to continue their legacy, just as Grandpa Henry and Grandmother Josephine strove to uplift humanity in spaces where their own humanity was denied.

I hope that my words have conveyed, dear Brother Steiner, my immense gratitude for all you were able to establish in your last sojourn on this planet and all that you continue to do from the heavens. I trust you understand that the work you do circles far around the globe and that there are many who have picked up the spiritual threads and continue to weave them into the many-faceted fabric of life. Thank you for contributions to the revelation of the warp and the weft of this great loom – and the joy and faith and true diligence with which you brought anthroposophy to the world.

With

much love,

Sister Linda

Linda Williams recently retired from Detroit Waldorf School. She is a member of the Pedagogical Section Council, the Hague Circle, the AWSNA Board of Trustees, the Sunbridge Board of Trustees, and a founding member of Alma Partners. Her recent research centers around women inspired directly or indirectly by anthroposophy, including Elsa Klink, Marie Steiner, Ita Wegman, Edith Maryon, Audre Lorde, and Gertrude Reif Hughes .

[A shortened version of this letter appeared in Anthroposophy Worldwide.]

Y ou walked with me, Brother Steiner, and opened doors...