Hospitality to New Generations

by Nathaniel Williams

At the beginning of 2023, I will be joining colleagues at the Goetheanum in Switzerland as the next leader of the Youth Section. In recent months I have been making transitions in New York, where I have lived and worked over the last fourteen years, rounding off responsibilities and turning toward this new task. Looking back, I am feeling gratitude for all the people I have been able to work with and learn from.

As this new, and unique, task comes closer I feel anticipation for the meetings and collaborations to come. Most sections of the School for Spiritual Science are dedicated to focused specializations, such as agriculture, natural science, or medicine. The Youth Section is dedicated to working with anthroposophy in connection with the early span of adult life. Its closest relative among the sections is the General Section, which is dedicated to universally significant facets of anthroposophy, no matter one’s vocation or specialization.

The Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland

If you have not been to the Goetheanum, in order to visit you have to climb a hill. Sometimes people even refer to the Goetheanum as “the hill”. While the Youth Section is international, and there are groups all over the world working together in its spirit, the placement of the Youth Section house in Dornach can speak to us. The Youth Section house is at the bottom of the hill. You are likely to be greeted by it on the way up. It is a place to tune ear and heart to the young people that come toward the Goetheanum. It is the Goetheanum come down to meet them, but it is also the Goetheanum come down to meet itself. While young people can come to feel they find something that belongs to them at the Goetheanum, the Goetheanum must also feel that it finds itself in the spirit and inspirations of the rising generation.

Relating to the spirit does not only happen through disciplined or established pathways, it must include a sincere, heartfelt hospitality to new generations.

This hospitality requires the lowering of barriers, the creating of openness. Not an openness that leads to dissolution, but one that can tolerate challenging the taboos of our time. Not a dissipating openness, a courageous one. Today we can speak casually of cynicism and despair, violence or sexuality but we can feel we are violating sacred agreements when we venture into a discussion of the interweaving of the earth, the human being and the creative spirit. Avoiding living explorations of the spirit can become unbearable, for the conversation is prompted by the dramatic and lyrical form of our own experience. While we effortlessly imagine our universe as solely comprised of matter and physical energy, the next moment we inwardly trace the inner movements of a friend’s musings or humor. Today these two wings of our lives are in perpetual dissonance, and this dissonance rings out, “Wake up to the question you are!” The Youth Section must be a place of courage that allows people to speak intimately about this subconscious tumult, but it must also rise to the intellectual challenges so many young people face in institutions of higher learning. It must try to support students to approach their areas of study in a way that is simply not possible in conventional institutions today.

As I look forward toward this new task I am sensitive to a peculiar and widespread atmosphere of recent decades. Not long ago an American writer described the mood as a time when “…the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they’d seen, what they’d done, or failed to do.” It is a necessity that we find ways out of this shock and stupor. It is true, we need to learn from the tragedies of the past century, and we are indeed surrounded by ghosts of bygone years, signs that we are none the wiser from the path of suffering of the last century. Today we live with urgent challenges in every facet of life, from ecological destruction to social justice, from technological revolutions to widespread extractive capitalism, from commercialized culture to epidemics of mental dis-ease. Resigned obsession with collective and personal failures must give way to a renewed will for the good and positive activity. This is an inherent capacity particular to young adulthood, and it is a need everywhere today, in all areas of life, the Anthroposophical Society not excluded. The Goetheanum has a unique contribution to make to today’s challenges, and this will be affected by its hospitality toward, and collaboration with, young adults. It is with my thoughts and heart turned in such directions that I prepare for the upcoming move.

Nathaniel Williams co-founded Free Columbia, a community cultural initiative in Columbia County, NY, and initiated the M.C. Richards Program, putting to work ideas about how education and culture can support, or oppose, our facing of current social and ecological challenges. He graduated in 2002 from studies in painting and anthroposophy at the neueKUNSTschule in Basel, Switzerland, being active since as an artist and teacher in art. He has been an active collaborator and contributor to the Youth Section for many years, in North America and worldwide, and has served on the ASA General Council as member at-large and Secretary. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the State University of New York at Albany.