“Excuse me,” I asked him, “is this a pilgrim shelter?”
“No, it’s a commune.”
This immediately interested me. “What sort of commune?”
“Well, we … hey do you want to join us for coffee?”
“Sure.”
Coffee was taken on an outdoor table and included some cake and ice cream. The man told me his name, something very Jewish-sounding which I promptly forgot again. I’m terrible with names. His wife joined us as well. They looked more or less like you’d expect members of a commune to look: he was tall and strong and had a bushy beard which was showing some grey. His hair was tied back into a small pony tail. He wore a plaid shirt and a dark vest. His wife had long hair and wore a long, plain dress. A few children came and went during the course of the next few minutes, and they too had names which sounded like words someone had pinched out of a Hebrew dictionary.
“So what sort of commune is this?” I asked again when we were settled. The man still seemed reluctant to say. He sipped his coffee languidly.
“Well, we’re a community of believers…”
…Yes? I wondered to myself. But nothing more came.
My body language must have betrayed my desire to know more. The woman interjected, “Yes, but the question you’ll be asking is, ‘what kind of believers?’”
That was indeed the question I would be asking.
The conversation picked up from there, and little by little I learned that their commune was part of a larger religious group called the 12 Tribes. Their central teaching is based on the two passages in the book of Acts in which it talks about the church in Jerusalem being a community in which no one had any property to himself, and where everything was shared. The 12 Tribes group believes that unless you follow this model of community, you are not a follower of Jesus.
I did not learn very much of this at that conversation, however. They mentioned a few times that the shofar was about to summon everyone to evening prayer. When the shofar blew, they invited me to join their prayer time.
It was all very quaint. In addition to their “normal” Gypsy-Amish clothing the women wore head coverings for the prayer time, and the men wore leather headbands. They sang some Jewish-sounding songs and they danced while they sang. They read a Bible passage from a standard Spanish Bible translation, but they substituted “Yahshua Messias” every time the word “Jesucristo” (Jesus Christ) appeared. They had a time of testimony in which they all said how great it was to belong to this family and of how God was healing them of many difficulties. They had a time of prayer for which the women and children huddled together in the center, and the men stood around them with their hands upraised.
After prayer time they invited me to dinner. All the food was organic and ecologically grown. Their own sustenance as a commune came from an on-premise bakery in which they also adhered to strict standards of all-natural recipes.
After dinner they invited me to spend the night. I think we could both see where this was going. I saw that they were showing old-fashioned hospitality, but that they also hoped that through their testimony and their conversation I might be won over. I’m pretty sure they saw that I had seen this and deemed it a worthwhile price. I helped them bag some of their bread loaves to be delivered in the morning. They showed me where I could shower and brush my teeth. They showed me where there was a bed for me, the bed which Kephas (whose birth certificate, I’m willing to bet, lists his first name as “Pedro”) made available for me while he went to sleep on the sofa.
All this time and until I left the next day I was being proselytized. They took it in turns to talk to me about how deep the errors of the Catholic and Protestant churches are; of how it is impossible to please God as long as you live a selfish life in which you own things, rather than sharing everything with the members of a commune; of how the end times were coming and their movement was a fulfillment of prophecy; of how I had misinterpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream all my life, because I had failed to grasp that the feet of iron and clay represent not the Roman Empire, but the Protestant and Catholic church (the Orthodox church went unmentioned in all this); of how following Yahshua was not “some mystical thing”, but a practical day-to-day attitude of loving the people in your commune.
For the most part I was able to listen to all this without feeling like I needed to argue. I knew how futile it was to try to reason with ideas such as these, and I did not want to abuse their hospitality by challenging their theology. But the last point was difficult for me. I feel that to know God at all is already “a mystical thing”. To know the God of Christianity is even more so, because there are all these complications like a Triune personality, and a Last Adam who somehow lives in me and absorbs the wrath but channels the grace, and to whose likeness I am being conformed through His Spirit, and all sorts of other stuff that cannot be conceived of, much less experienced, in any but mystical terms. What convinces me about Christianity is not that its morality differs greatly from that of other moral systems; it does differ, but not much. What convinces me is that it alone seems to have a radically different, and radically spiritual, answer of how to live the life that all moral systems teach and yet all also admit is impossible to achieve. And this answer lies in a mystical union with the Creator of the Universe and the Redeemer of humanity. Following Jesus means you can maintain a practical day-to-day attitude of loving all humans because you have “some mystical thing”.
After a very short night’s sleep, I was awakened by singing voices. It was 5 AM, and morning prayers were beginning.
It was easy to feel a lot of things for them. I felt pity, in a way, because my brief contact with them had already shown that they were very closed. In their theology, heaven would contain only themselves and the members of the 1st-century church. They seemed to be trying to re-invent the wheel, as it were, ignoring the many communes and communal movements that had existed, and still exist, within the Church. In fact they ignored most of Church history except for the messy bits which their own 30-year-old movement could be favorably compared to (when your movement has only existed a few decades, it is guaranteed to look more wholesome and together than after 2,000 years). They forced some strange interpretations on many Bible passages. They kept their world small and simple. They were very friendly and hospitable. Very friendly and hospitable. Think of the most friendly Mennonites you’ve ever met, and you’ll get the idea. But they were also narrow and legalistic. Legalism always feels a little alarming to me.
But I also felt happy for them as I heard their stories of how they had found a home here. And they were certainly very committed to a hard spiritual school – submitting to an entire life of extreme community. This may lead them to much deeper “mystical” things than they expect. As I watched them during their prayer times, I suspected a deeper kinship than we might have acknowledged to each other. It struck me that it is ultimately the Parent, and not the sibling, who knows all the members of the family.
The "Twelve Tribes" commune outside of Donostia San Sebastian. I'm thinking that I should have taken pictures of the commune members, but I didn't know how to do that without appearing rude. (The "Welcome Pilgrims" sign did not make it into the picture.)