As I said at the time …

You ask about “Anabaptist.” I’ll try for a short answer and hope it works. In the early Protestant Reformation, three major streams emerged. The Anabaptists accused the Lutherans and Calvinists (Reformed, Presbyterian, and English Puritan churches, among others) of not carrying the faith far enough and, as a consequence, were severely persecuted by them and the Roman Catholics. As the first to argue for a strict separation of church and state, they became pacifists who warned that any official state church seriously compromises the Gospel. The movement exists today as Mennonites, Amish, Church of the Brethren (or, in its older forms, Dunker), River Brethren, Bruderhoff, Amanas, Hutterites, and – by extension – the Society of Friends, or Quakers. It traces its roots to the Waldensians, the communalistic radical Christian movement against whom the Inquisition was launched. Its traditions include non-violence, simplicity, discipleship, community. You can see the absurdity in having one of them as a military chaplain! (In Catch-22.)

The term itself means “rebaptized,” an argument that infant baptisms (which that first generation had undergone, before the Reformation emerged) were invalid: the only authentic acceptance of faith could be made as an adult.

Because the Mennonites took literally Amos 5:23, “I will hear thy viols no more,” they banned instrumental music from their lives. Somehow, though, they practice four-part unaccompanied singing that seems to be part of their genetic endowment. Their hymnals cover the range of church music, from all denominations and eras, as long as it sings well. Whether gathered as six or eight people standing in a circle in someone’s living room, or as six hundred adults singing a Bach chorale at a wedding, the effect is quite moving: you have to be loud enough to contribute to the worship, but soft enough to be aware of everyone else. As an old-style Quaker once told me, “Jnana, thee has to remember that in their singing, the Mennonites are experiencing something very much like what we feel in our silence.”

Kenneth Rexroth, whose ancestry was in the Dunker/Brethren tradition, details much of this history in one of his collections of essays. (Don’t have the title at hand, but it’s the one about communalism.) Another poet who was Brethren is William Stafford.

You mention Thomas Merton. He inherited some of this tradition through one of his parents who was Quaker. But he felt the liberal Meeting (as Friends’ congregations are known) he attended as a child was well-intentioned but superficial, and yearned instead for the depth of its earlier generations. The rest, as they say …

Have you seen Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk? As a Protestant who draws strength from her retreats and friendships in the monasteries of the Great Plains, she has some wonderful insights into abbey life.

OK, I promised to keep this short!

And I do hope your parking problems with J have found an appropriately adult resolution, other than your turning the other cheek – which, to continue all this theology, was originally an act of defiance, causing the abusive person to lose face. (By the way, 7^th and Race, I take it, is Zinzinnati?)

Blessings …