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In DYNAMIC OUT OF SILENCE, Professor Spoerri probes the
secret of one of the controversial men of our time, Frank Buchman,
the initiator of Moral Re-Armament. Theophil Spoerri, who held the
chair of French and Italian Literature at Zurich University for
thirty years, was one of Europe’s out-standing intellectuals and
scholars. He was also a man of action, as his initiative in the
Swiss ‘Gotthard League’ during the war makes clear. Spoerri knew
Frank Buchman well. He examines with candor and insight Buchman’s
effectiveness as a Christian revolutionary, the scope of his
thinking and the progress of his life-long battle to build up a
force of men and women dedicated to remaking the world.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD by Garth Lean
THE BEGINNlNGS
Introduction
Beloved Pennsylvania
The wider horizon
First steps
An underground atomic explosion
The laboratory
Out to the world
The Chinese tragedy
BREAKTHROUGH
Resign!
Prophets of a new age
In the fire of persecution
On earth as it is in Heaven
Nordic adventure
From Switzerland to the world
The new Netherlands
The battle of ideologies
The fate of Germany
MEETING
THE CRISIS
Moral Re-Armament 121
The storm 130
Withdrawal from the world, return to the world 133
Frank Buchman on the brink of death 140
ISLAND HOUSE – MOUNTAIN HOUSE
Island House
The new Swiss Confederates
Mountain House
Linking the intimate and the global
TEAMS AS FORMATIVE CELLS OF HISTORY
History on the move
Frank Buchman and the team
Team on the march
Team in danger
THE LAST YEARS
Arrived, yet going on
Why not let God run the whole world?
EPILOGUE by Pierre Spoerri
Will Reprint Epilogue Soon
AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Foreword
Theophil Spoerri was a man of great intellect,
but greater heart. That was always my impression as I met him
through the years from the late 1930’s until his death on
Christmas Eve, 1975. As he grew older, his mind kept its freshness
while his heart warmed further and matured.
Of his learning there can be no question. After
studying literature and education at the Universities of Zurich,
Bern, Paris and Vienna, he first taught at the Freies Gymnasium
at Bern. Then, at the age of thirty-two, he was appointed
Professor of French and Italian Literature at Zurich University, a
chair which he graced until his retirement thirty-four years
later. He was Rector of the University from 1948 to 1950.
His books on Pascal and Dante gained him a
European reputation. The city of Florence awarded him its Gold
Medal for his works on Dante, for which the Italian government
also entitled him ‘Commendatore’. His lit-erary interests were
always wide. Between 1943 and 1951, he and a colleague edited and
published the literary review, Trivium, which brought
together original Ger-man, French and Italian literary thought.
It was in 1932 that Professor Spoerri met the
subject of this book. Spoerri often described how that meeting
transformed his life and how, in particular, it brought him down
from his study at the top of his tall Zurich house tothe lower
floors as people became for him even more important than books.
His leadership of the Goahardbund (League of the Gotthard) during
the war was an extension of that new involvement. Its object was
to fight against defeatism and ideological infiltration when
Switzerland was surrounded, and it played a distinguished part in
the battle for freedom. The picture I have of
Spoerri in the years since then is of him surrounded by people
– workers, students, Asians, Africans, East European dissidents,
all kinds of people, especially young people. Spoerri is always
listening – listening and then just putting in the crucial word
which liberated a mind or a heart to a wider destiny.
Spoerri was a perfectionist, as the history of
this book shows. He once told me that he had written five books
about Frank Buchman, and discarded them one after another, through
the years, as not satisfying him. The problem, of course, was the
difficulty of the subject. How to catch this 'extraordinary,
ordinary man’, who did so much and was so controversial, in a
book of manageable proportions? It is the marvelous economy of
the writing of this, his sixth attempt, which I particularly
admire.
Professor Spoerri’s study, the first by an
international scholar who had adequate opportunity to know and
observe him, will be appreciated by all who value our Christian
heritage.
GARTH LEAN Oxford, April 1976
Introduction by Theophil Spoerri
My first meeting with Frank Buchman was a surprise
because there was nothing surprising about it. I had heard remarkable
things about him and so expected to see an unusual personality. Instead,
he turned out to be a man of medium height, wearing glasses, with a rather
pointed nose and roundish head. From his well-groomed appearance I would
have associated him more with the board-room than the pulpit.
There was nothing spectacular about him. The effect
he produced was due more to quietness than to anything he said. His gift
was to make the ordinary the basis of the extraordinary, the ordinary man
the doer of extraordinary things.
In a day when so many hate what is ordinary and turn to dangerous
ways of escape into the extraordinary, Frank Buchman saw with clarity that
it is in the midst of, and out of, the ordinary that man can discover and
create the extraordinary.
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Beloved
Pennsylvania Chapter One
Frank Buchman’s origins gave no hint that he
would be one of the men who stir and shake the world.
It is not easy now to picture what a small
American town looked like at the end of the nineteenth century,
though Allentown today still lies in an idyllic countryside
reminiscent of Switzerland; and the ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, who
settled this farming country after emigrating from Europe, still
speak – as Frank Buchman did – a dialect that sounds like a
mixture of Swabian and Swiss German.
About the year 1750, a certain Martin Buchman
and his family emigrated from St Gallen in the eastern part of
Switzerland. They sailed in the Phoenix from Amster-dam,
landed at Philadelphia, and started a farm near Pennsburg,
Pennsylvania. One of his descendants, the father of Frank Buchman,
was enterprising enough to go as far west as Indiana where he worked
on building roads. After catching malaria, however, he returned to
the old Buchman farm. In 1875 he married Sarah Greenwalt and set up
in a general store in Pennsburg. The income from this enabled him to
open a small hotel in a house which is still standing today. It
catered mainly for business men and commercial travelers. It was
very much a family business. ‘I used to wash the dishes,’ Frank
Buchman recalled.
Pennsburg was a village with one main street
and a population of about twelve
hundred. As a boy, if he could not get to sleep at night, Frank
Buchman used to count over the inhabitants name by name, house by
house. The people there, used to working hard in the fields, very
strict in church observance, were noted above all for their
hospitality. No matter what house you went into, you would always be
invited to sit down and join in the family meal.
Frank Buchman lived there until he was fifteen
and liked to recall these early years. ‘I used to walk the
one-and-a-half miles to the upper Perkiomen River with Daddy Sheip,’
he would say. 'It had a creek where there was good fishing and Daddy
Sheip knew just which part of the bank to choose. We had to converse
in whispers and if a fish got away from him it was always my fault.
We were real fishermen though, and next morning I would fry my fish
for breakfast. It was a happy time.’
The school in Pennsburg had just been opened
when he entered it at the age of eight.
At fifteen he had to move to a high school. As
the nearest was in Allentown, Frank Buchman senior sold the hotel
in Pennsburg and opened a restaurant on Allentown’s main street.
He used to sell a drink called sarsaparilla, a forerunner of
Coca-Cola. ‘Nobody ever came to our home without getting a glass
of sarsaparilla,’ Frank said.
Frank Buchman senior was a keen sportsman.
Every Saturday he drove to the races behind his two spanking black
horses. ‘I was allowed to go too, but not allowed to bet.’
From his father Frank inherited a sociable
nature and a sense of humor. From his mother came deeply rooted
moral convictions and a firm faith. A large photograph of her hung
opposite his bed, and her eyes show how much
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