Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer

This evocative collection brings together the poems and essays of British farmer Philip Britts (1907–1949), who led a Bruderhof community of Christian pacifists in Devon, England, before WWII. As Europe plunged into war, Britts moved his pacifist congregation from England to a settlement in Paraguay, where they felt they could live out their ideals of peace. Britts’s poems and musings—collected here by Harries, a writer who attended his original congregation as a young girl—offer a window into a life defined by clear Christian values of radical pacifism, love of neighbor, and care for the Earth. Britts provides a gentle corrective to modern impulses of acquisition and aggression, his ebullient verses always returning to wonder and awe at the natural world: “All life is joy again/ The longest drought shall pass/ Bringeth sweet drenching rain/ Life for the grass.” Britts’s efforts in Paraguay may strike modern readers as misguided ecologically and socially (he elevates his way of living and farming above that of the locals), but his refusal to participate in WWII and his respect for the South Americans redeem him in the end. Britts’s work will be an inspiration for Christians and humanists seeking peace and purpose in a tumultuous world. (Mar.)