All Christmas Blessings

Food, glorious food?

A warm welcome to this post, the last one I shall be sending out in 2023. In this edition, the focus is mostly on different aspects of Christmas, all drawn from the time in the 1920s and 30s when Adela Curtis was based here in Dorset. The first image is of a Christmas Card she sent to her sister Clara in the States. Next we get a glimpse of Christmas celebrated in community in 1938 - who was there and what food was likely to have been served up? I sense that food was a complex issue for Adela, from her diary and earlier writings about it. Then this post finishes with some words from a bible study Adela wrote about Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the nativity story.

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‘All Christmas Blessings’

A Christmas card sent by Adela to her older sister Clara (Clare) Vaughan Eaves.

The Christmas card above was sent by Adela Curtis to her sister Clara (whom Adela addressed as Clare) sometime in the late 1920s or 1930s. The original design was by Adela’s niece, Phil Hutchinson - the daughter of her youngest sibling, Mabel. On the back of the card, Adela has written, ‘This is one of Phil’s woodcuts, which the critics highly approve’.

The Curtis family was large and scattered around the globe, with Adela being the only one living permanently in England. Clara was in the USA and Mabel lived in New Zealand. Mabel’s daughters Phil and Eve had come to live with Adela earlier in the 1920s and were now based in London but came down to Dorset regularly. (If you would like more information about the Curtis family and see a simplified family tree, click on this link.)

It may have been that Adela felt she needed to send a ‘proper’ card this year because in a letter she wrote to Clara one February, she offered the following apology:

I am so sorry my “Xmas card” of Part 4 Healing Miracles didn’t reach you in time as I had planned, but you will have had it soon after I expect, & know that I had not neglected you.

For Adela, her teaching was of more significance than a mere Christmas card. It would seem that Clara thought otherwise: it was important for her to feel remembered ‘properly’ at Christmas. She may also have been concerned about Adela, knowing that she had heart trouble and was beginning to fear the worst when there was silence from her sister at Christmas.

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Christmas Day 1938

On 1 January 1939, Adela Curtis started her new page-a-day diary and as well as writing of events of that day, she also made a brief note about Christmas Day, the week before. She gives us a glimpse of the people who gathered in community to celebrate the birth of Christ together and also a clue as to the kind of food that would have been consumed. Later entries in her diary show that Adela thought a great deal about food, not to overeat, but strictly to regulate what she consumed.

Adela wrote in her diary:

Pleasant party for Christmas Day dinner in Refectory with presents and music after in Common Room. Present: Sr Elisabeth, Sr Mary, Sr Margaret, Sr Evelyn, Sr Joanna, Sr Francesca, Sr Helene; Mr Lane, Simone, Ernst, Sr Monica, Phil, Eve, & AMC.

Sr Margaret provided an excellent “Genesis” dinner.

Edwin sailed for S. Africa Dec 31 hoping to come back.

Rooms

• The Refectory she mentioned is still in use as the Dining Room, although some remodelling of the space has taken place since then.

• Their Common Room is the current Sitting Room. That room has a similar look, but now the windows are double-glazed and there is electricity and central heating. Adela Curtis would have approved of double-glazing, I think, as it conserves the heat within the room. However, she deliberately never had electricity here and I am sure she would have frowned on central heating.

On the left, a photo of the Common Room, included in a magazine article in July 1939. On the right, a view of the same room, now called the Sitting Room in 2023.

People

• Adela and members of her family. Starting at the end of her list of people, AMC is Adela Curtis herself and Phil and Eve are her two nieces, who at this time live in London but come back to Dorset about once a month and for holidays to visit their Aunt Adela. She also mentions another family member later in this extract, namely her youngest brother Edwin, who was not with them for Christmas but had been happily living in the community for some months in 1938. There were hopes that he would return to live on site more permanently, but there is no evidence to suggest that this happened.

• Sisters Elisabeth, Mary, Evelyn, and Francesca are all commemorated in the chapel, as is Sr Margaret’s son, Geoffrey de Pury: further information about these and others can be found by clicking on this link. At present there is no additional information about Sisters Joanna, Helene and Monica, except to say that they had all left the community by September 1939, nine months later.

• Mr Lane, Simone and Ernst. The Lane family lived on site, renting one of the wooden dwellings to the east of the main house. Simone was Mr Lane’s daughter. There was a Mrs Lane, but she seems not to have attended the community Christmas. The income from renting out some of the properties would have helped the community to continue its life and ministry.

• Lily Cancellor, Adela’s greatest friend, had died suddenly in October 1938, otherwise she almost certainly would have been one of the party on Christmas Day.

Food

• In her earlier life, Adela followed and advocated the Haig diet, and had written a chapter about it in her friend Mrs Earle’s 1903 book A Third Pot-Pouri. Dr Haig believed that uric acid was the cause of much ill health and so his aim was to eliminate as much uric acid from the diet as possible. This meant avoiding meat and fish as well as eggs, pulses (peas, beans, lentils), tea, coffee, cocoa, and alcohol. In her later years, when the Bible came to have a significant influence upon all areas of her life, Adela believed that the first five books of the Old Testament held all that was needed to direct right living. For food, Adela stated that she drew her guidelines for the community from Genesis chapter 1, verse 29. This verse comes at the culmination of the first account of the creation, in which God blesses the human couple, gives them ‘dominion’ (stewardship?) over the created world and then says this to the humans about food:

‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’

• Thus the Genesis dinner which was served up for Christmas Day would almost certainly have included only vegetable matter, and definitely not meat or fish, or products from these. It might have been a vegan Christmas meal, in fact.

• Adela’s diary reveals that she was not in the best of health during 1939. She had heart trouble and reluctantly allowed a doctor to see her for some weeks in the Spring and before that she had accepted an ‘invalid’ diet for herself which included fish. By March 1939, however, Adela decided to return to an even stricter diet for herself and she recorded her intentions in her diary. She also noted ideas she had for writing a gardening and cookery book using Genesis 1: 29 as its guide. She wrote on March 26:

Revised regime =

5[am] Herb Tea

7[am] Broth & Crushed Wheat

11[am Herb Tea

12.30[pm] Fresh fruit. Vegetables.

4[pm] Herb Tea

6.30[pm] Dried Fruit. Salad.

This cuts out starch, salt, pepper, spices, sugar, bread, biscuits, cakes, cereals (all but Wheat porridge) puddings, pastries, jams, tea, coffee, cocoa, nuts, all factory foods. Very little cooking: only 2 vegs & the broth: & washing salad & dried fruit.

Am cutting out figs, too tiresome with dental plates. Raisins, prunes, dates, apricots, pears are enough. Foreign fruit can be replaced by bottles homegrown. Lemons by bottled red currant juice.

Must grow more Mint, Sage, Thyme, Marjoram, Rue, Betony, Speedwell, Fennell, Tarragon, Chervil. Should like to write a gardening book with Gen: 1.29 food chemistry & economics & full cultural & cooking directions for ½ acre garden.

• Her desire to remove ‘foreign’ foods from her diet and consume only UK if not homegrown, produced fruit and vegetables, resonates with current concerns felt about food miles.

• However, overall her food regime above does seem extremely strict and meagre. Later in the year, her diary became the place where she made a note everyday of everything she ate and drank and the quantities of each and also at what times of day she consumed them. I am not an expert, but these entries could suggest that she was obsessed with food. It is quite nice to read that after a visit from her nieces one weekend, her daily food intake included a slice of seed cake.

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‘Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart’

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Adela sent out weekly Bible Notes in term time to various students around the country and to some, including her sister Clara, across the globe. Edition 24 of these notes focussed on the Christmas story as found in Luke’s gospel chapter 2. This tells of the shepherds out in the fields encountering the heavenly host of angels and being told of the child born in Bethlehem, ‘who is the Messiah’. The shepherds go into the city to see the child for themselves (this is the scene illustrated on the Christmas card above). The shepherds speak of their own experience and what the angels had said to them. Having listened to their story, ‘all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart’. Adela focussed on Mary’s reaction in this part of her Bible Notes:

This verse describing [Mary’s] personal & intimate reaction to these supernatural experiences gives us the perfect rule for Bible study as well as the secrets of Christian practice.  To keep all these things in our hearts, pondering, … is the true way of learning.  Only through the heart can we ever know Christ.  That old-fashioned word ‘ponder’ means much more than to weigh, to think over, to consider, as the dictionary says.  It has a far deeper sense which is not so much an act of the mind as a state of feeling.  And this state is one of absorption, of brooding contemplation when there is no conscious movement of the mental faculties, no actual thinking as a process, but a most vital & intense stillness of reception to the innermost stillness of the words.  It is emphatically not dreaming, nor is it any kind of passivity.  Still less is it that idle enjoyment of imaginary experiences in which so many undisciplined minds waste time & energy.  It is essentially the same as true meditation or contemplation, & to attain it pride, self-will, restlessness, disobedience, self-seeking, intellectual conceit, ambition, greed, sloth, self-pity, anger, malice, & all uncharitableness must be renounced.  The heart must become ‘the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, where is born to us a Saviour which is Christ the Lord’.  This is to share in the blessed experience of Mary & to know what she felt when she sang

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour’.

I am particularly struck by her phrases describing the deeper meaning of ‘to ponder’ as ‘a state of feeling… a most vital & intense stillness of reception to the innermost stillness of the words’. These sound like words describing her own experience of meditation, at its best.

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In Search of Adela Curtis, a 20th Century Mystic

Booking is now open for this event which will be taking place at Othona West Dorset, Thurs 20 - Sun 23 June 2024.

In Search of Adela Curtis, a 20th Century Mystic. I am delighted that some of you have booked on this event already. If you would like to join me and others at Othona West Dorset when I will be sharing from the wide range of research I have been doing on Adela Curtis and the communities she founded, please do book on using the orange link above. It will be great spending some time face to face with a number of you and exploring some of the key discoveries.

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I want to say a big thank you to my blog post buddies for accompanying me on my travels in the States in October - having you with me meant a great deal. Thank you also for continuing to journey with me into the research on my return. Plans for 2024 include continuing to post here about once a fortnight, plus I intend to get back into writing the actual book, having had a bit of a break from that whilst planning and carrying out my research trip. And then there is the residential event here at Othona in June, of course, which I am very much looking forward to.

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas and a fruitful and happy 2024.

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