My Journey from Africa to Corps de Michael

The Spirit of Whitsun & the Mission of Group Work — on Whitsunday 2009, friends and members gathered in Hershey, PA for the Susquehanna Corps de Michael’s 16th annual Whitsun Festival. Our theme celebrated two new members who are natives of South Korea and Ghana, Africa. Saetbyul Ryu and Kofi Nsiah found their way to the Corps de Michael branch of the Anthroposophical Society in Hershey through recent outreach activities... Here are Kofi’s remarks to friends and members gathered at Stonehaven on Whitsunday 2009:

by Kofi Nsiah

I was born in a small farming village in the central part of Ghana, Africa, shortly after the Second World War. My cultural background reflects a close-knit tribal and blood-related society in which nearly everyone in the village was related by blood or marriage. The religious practice was nature worship that believes in some form of reincarnation. In fact, my parents believed I was an incarnated great-uncle of my father’s, and they often told me stories about him.

Soon after I was born, the Wesleyan missionaries introduced the Christian Methodist church and school in my village. Most children born at this time went to the school, and were required to abandon all aspects of traditional beliefs, including religious practices (and reincarnation). Transition to the new Christian beliefs became difficult for me since the Christian teachers and preachers forced me to abandon a core part of what my parents had taught me to believe about my being as an incarnated soul. I became a Christian, but the question regarding “who I am” persisted. I embarked on a lifelong quest for answers. I studied the Bible intensely and when I was admitted to a teachers’ college, I enrolled in an elective course on world religions. I was fascinated when I first read that Eastern religious practices included the teaching of reincarnation. However, I could not be completely satisfied until I attained certainty as to whether Jesus taught about reincarnation and what he taught about it.

In 1986 I moved to England to live and work in a Camphill Village, the Croft community. I was asked to work in the Camphill Bookstore in Malton, and I started to read about Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science and the Christ Impulse. During one of Camphill’s Saturday Bible Evenings, I raised a question about my conflict with the teachings of the Christian church regarding reincarnation. A Christian Community priest who happened to be at the gathering read Matthew 11:14. Jesus was teaching his disciples about John the Baptist. Then he said: “And if you will receive it, this (John) is Elijah, who was to come.” I finally got the answer I had been searching for all my life—that Jesus also knew and taught about reincarnation, referring to John as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah!

In my quest to find and congregate with individuals of similar spiritual aspirations, a passage by Rudolf Steiner has brought constant inspiration. It is from a lecture given in Oslo, 7 June, 1910: “Those who understand the spirit today are drawn toward spiritual science. It is this spirit which, reflecting the spirit of the age, transcends individual folk souls.”

In 1987 I moved to Camphill Copake in New York to participate in the social therapy seminar, during which I also studied biodynamic farming. I later studied Waldorf education, after which I moved to Pennsylvania to teach at the Kimberton Waldorf School. Finally, I settled in York, central Pennsylvania, where I met David Lenker, who introduced me to Corps de Michael. Members of Corps de Michael have shown sisterly and brotherly acceptance in the spirit of Michael’s task of the age, “cosmopolitanism,” in spite of my background.

Susquehanna Corps de Michael — Anthroposophical Society in Hershey, PA — www.corpsdemichael.org