The World of Brother Andreas

You hardly notice it. We imagine the world of saints so much more beautiful than it probably was. As if their presence alone was enough to make people and things around them shine with a soft glow. As if all evil were totally banned and stripped of its menacing danger.

In this way we create for ourselves a far too friendly picture of the world of Venerable Brother Andreas. We see him grow up in a good-natured farming family, reach adulthood among sympathetic students in the teacher training college and become calmly employed in the safe and happy climate of a catholic boarding school. We see him briskly making his contribution to the education of the rapidly developing Brabant, until he retires humbly into a quiet and peaceful community, where he would die relatively soon, after a short illness. We see him surrounded by warm-hearted farmers, kind fellow brothers and enthusiastic school children: all of them committed, positive people glowing perhaps like Brother Andreas himself.

continuous war

It would not be difficult to see the contrast as well. But do we really see it? You only have to remember how his famous contemporary, Vincent van Gogh, painted rural Brabant to realize how harsh and tough life was. You only have to read the chronicles of the brothers to discover how much the lonely, pitiful children suffered at the boarding school and how the community was torn by fierce, narrow-minded conflicts. Going through the history books we become aware of the continuous wars in the time of Andreas: the Crimean War at the time of his novitiate, various continental and colonial wars during his teaching years, and on top of it a world war during his years of retirement. In Tilburg you could literally hear the thundering force of the explosions at the horizon; and you could see the violence reflected in the large numbers of refugees.

meaningless respectability

If we do not report that contrast, our saints fade into a romantic, meaningless respectability. When we do take it into account their lives stand out against a background of suffering and violence. We are better able to feel how they experienced the tension themselves, surrounded day after day by pale distraught faces and depressed by the gloomy articles in the courant. We are better able to get a picture of what it meant to choose for a Christian life of hope, charity and service in the midst of that raw and drab reality.

angry fellow traveller 

There is an anecdote of the life of Brother Andreas reminding us of that contrast. Brother Nicetas Doumen tells: ‘In about the year 1900 we received in Oss a visit from Brother Andreas, who arrived from Zwolle. He related that during his journey he had been sitting opposite a man who had been angrily looking at him, all the way to Oss… Brother Andreas declared that he had never seen anyone look that dirty and he could not understand how the traveler was able to keep it up.’ The brothers who heard the story, did not understand how Brother Andreas was able to stay seated across that man the entire journey. Why had he not looked for another compartment in the train?

English translation of The World of Brother Andreas, pp. 111-112, by Brother Edward Gresnigt.

See for the Dutch edition: De wereld van Frater Andreas (Tilburg, Fraters CMM 2017)

Illustration: View on the city of Tilburg, by Hendrik de Laat in 1927. Regional Archives, Brabant.