Oh, hello. I'm so glad you're back.
Last time we sat together, I took you into a field --- into color and fragrance and the slow, patient miracle of a world learning to be beautiful. Flowers, of all things. Flowers, and what they quietly changed. I hope you carried a little of that with you when you walked back out into your day. I hope you noticed something blooming that you might have passed right by before.
Today I want to take you somewhere very different. No open meadows. No sunlight through a canopy of petals.
Today we go inside. A low door. A shuttered window. A family gathered close in the dark, very still, very quiet. Somewhere in the North Sea flatlands of the Netherlands, in the dangerous middle years of the sixteenth century, a man is trying to sleep.
He won't sleep deeply. He never does anymore.
But he has made his peace with that.
His name is Menno Simons --- and by the time this story is done, I think you'll understand why I have never quite forgotten him.
I have watched humanity for a very long time, and I will tell you something I have learned.
A man can sleep with half an ear open, if he knows the dogs will bark.
It is as old as anything I can remember. Older than cities. Older than writing. Long before walls and locks and soldiers, when the first small bands of human beings pulled close around their fires in the dark, they figured out that the dog would tell them. The dog always knew first. And so people learned to sleep --- really sleep, the deep restoring kind --- because something faithful and four-legged was already listening for them.
I watched that compact form, ten thousand years ago. I found it rather beautiful, honestly. Not the fear that made it necessary. The trust. The shared arrangement between a creature that never sleeps deeply and a creature that needed to. Between the one who watches and the one who rests.
Menno Simons understood this arrangement intimately.
He wrote about it himself, in words that have stayed with me ever since. When other ministers, he said, repose on easy beds and downy pillows --- when they feast and pipe and boast loudly --- we must look out, when the dogs bark, lest the captors be at hand.
I want you to sit with that for a moment.
This is a man writing about his own life. His own nights. His wife beside him, his children small and breathing in the dark. The scratch and shuffle of a dog somewhere outside. And Menno, one ear always open, listening for the difference between a dog greeting a fox and a dog greeting men with torches and chains.
He was not a soldier. He was not a rebel. He had been, of all things, a priest --- a quiet, bookish man from a flat and windswept corner of Friesland who had once been too afraid to read the Bible because he thought it might confuse him. And now here he was. Hunted. Hidden. Worth a hundred guilders to anyone willing to turn him in --- a price put on his head by the Holy Roman Emperor himself.
And yet.
He kept writing. He kept traveling, secretly, from farmhouse to farmhouse, from one small gathering of frightened, faithful people to the next. He kept showing up.
I have known braver men, I suppose, in the military sense of the word. Men who charged into battle without flinching. But there is a different kind of courage --- quieter, harder to sustain --- that asks you not to charge, but simply to keep going. To rise each morning in a world that wants you gone, and choose, again, to build something rather than destroy anything.
That is the courage I want to tell you about today.
That is Menno Simons.
Let me tell you where Menno came from. Because it matters.
He was born in 1496, in Witmarsum --- a small village in Friesland, which is the flat, sea-bitten northwest corner of what we now call the Netherlands. His father was a peasant. The land was low and the sky was enormous and the wind came off the North Sea like it owned everything, which, honestly, it mostly did.
He was a bright boy. Bright enough that someone noticed, and bright enough that noticing led somewhere --- to a monastic school, probably run by Franciscans, where young Menno was prepared for the priesthood. He learned Latin. He learned Greek. He read the Church Fathers. He did everything a young man of his station was supposed to do to become a man of God.
And I watched him do it, and I loved him even then --- this careful, serious boy, working so hard to become what everyone around him expected.
He was ordained a priest in 1524, at twenty-eight years old. And here is the thing that still makes me smile, a little sadly, when I think about it: he had never read the Bible. Not once. Not a word of it. He was afraid, he said later, that it would mislead him.
I have seen that fear before, in many places, in many centuries. The fear of the book that might undo everything you have been told to believe. The fear that looking too closely at the foundation might reveal it to be sand.
Menno looked anyway.
It started small --- a doubt about transubstantiation, the doctrine that the bread and wine of communion become the actual body and blood of Christ. The doubt crept in quietly, the way doubts do, and Menno, being Menno, could not leave it alone. He went to Luther's writings. He went, finally, to the New Testament itself. And what he found there did not match what he had been teaching from the pulpit.
He kept going to the pulpit anyway. For years. This is the part that moves me most, I think --- the long, agonizing middle, when he knew and could not yet act, when he stood between the life he had and the life he was being called toward, and simply... waited. Preached. Doubted. Prayed.
Then, in 1535, the world cracked open.
At a place called Old Cloister, near Bolsward, three hundred Anabaptists were killed. Men and women who had believed, as Menno was coming to believe, that faith must be chosen and not merely inherited. That baptism meant something only if the person being baptized understood what they were saying yes to.
Among the dead was Menno's own brother, Pieter.
I was there. I saw it. And I watched Menno, far away in his parish, receive the news --- and I watched something in him stop pretending.
He spent a year in hiding after that. Writing. Praying. Reading. Falling apart and putting himself back together in a different shape. He wrote about the spiritual resurrection. About new birth. About the twenty-fifth Psalm. And when he finally emerged, in late 1536, he was no longer a Catholic priest.
He was something the world didn't quite have a word for yet.
He had been baptized again --- as a believer, by his own conscious choice. He had been ordained, quietly, by a small peaceful community of Anabaptists who had somehow survived the storm. He had married a woman named Gertrude. And he had accepted, with full knowledge of what it meant, a life on the run.
The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V issued an edict against him in 1542. One hundred guilders for his capture. People were executed simply for giving his family a room for the night.
And still he went. From farmhouse to farmhouse. From one small, frightened, faithful community to the next. Writing. Teaching. Listening, always, for the dogs.
I followed him, when I could. I couldn't help it. I have always been drawn to the people who choose the harder, quieter thing. The ones who decide that how you build matters as much as what you build.
Menno was one of those people. One of the best I have ever known.
I want you to understand what Menno was walking into. Because it was not simple, and it was not safe, and the choice he made was not the obvious one.
The sixteenth century was on fire.
Not metaphorically --- though it was that too. I mean that literally. Europe was burning. The Reformation had cracked the old order open like an egg, and what was spilling out was not only new life but also rage, and fear, and the particular violence that happens when people who have been told what to believe for a thousand years suddenly discover they are allowed to think.
Martin Luther had nailed his theses to a door. Henry VIII had remade an entire national church to suit his domestic arrangements. And in the city of Münster, in 1534, a group of radical Anabaptists had done something that terrified everyone --- Catholic and Protestant alike. They had seized the city. Declared a theocratic kingdom. Practiced polygamy. Taken up swords in the name of God. And when Münster fell, when the armies broke through the walls and the leaders were tortured to death in the public square, the name Anabaptist became, across most of Europe, synonymous with danger.
This is what Menno stepped into.
This is the world that looked at him and said: you are one of them.
And this is where I want you to feel the full weight of what he did. Because Menno looked back at that world --- at Rome on one side, with its wealth and its hierarchy and its willingness to burn people for disagreement, and at Münster on the other side, with its violence and its certainty and its willingness to kill people for the kingdom --- and he said no to both of them.
Not loudly. Menno was never loud. But completely.
What he offered instead was something so simple it was almost invisible. A community gathered by choice. People who came together not because a prince commanded it, not because they had been baptized as infants before they could speak, not because the alternative was exile or death --- but because they wanted to. Because they had read the words themselves, thought about them, and said yes with their whole hearts.
Believer's baptism. That was the hinge everything turned on. It sounds like a small theological point. It was not small at all.
To insist that baptism requires a conscious, willing, adult commitment is to say something radical about the human soul. It is to say that faith cannot be inherited like property or assigned like a tax. It is to say that the inner life of a person --- their relationship with God, their moral commitments, their spiritual identity --- belongs to them. Not to their parents. Not to their king. Not to their bishop.
To them.
I have heard this idea in many places across many centuries. I heard it in the desert fathers, sitting alone in the Egyptian sand. I heard it in the Sufi poets spinning in their circles of love. I heard it in the quiet Japanese monk raking gravel into patterns only God could see from the right angle. The idea that the soul has a dignity that no institution can grant and no institution can revoke.
Menno put that idea into pamphlets and handed it to farmers.
That is what makes me love him so completely.
His writings were not academic treatises. He was not writing for theologians in universities. He was writing for ordinary people --- people who worked with their hands, who couldn't afford to lose a day's wages, who were already frightened. He wrote clearly. He wrote warmly. He wrote as if the person reading was intelligent and capable and worthy of being told the truth directly.
The authorities understood exactly how dangerous this was. They were not wrong. An idea that reaches ordinary people, in language they can understand, about their own inherent worth and their own capacity to discern truth --- that idea does not stay quiet.
It spread. Hand to hand. Farmhouse to farmhouse.
And the communities that gathered around it --- these small, voluntary, mutually accountable groups of people who had chosen each other and chosen this --- they developed something I found extraordinary to watch. They took care of one another. Not because a law required it. Not because a priest told them to. Because they had decided, together, that this was what it meant to live the way they believed.
No violence. No coercion. No sword raised in the name of heaven.
Just people, choosing each other, over and over, in the dark.
I watched it, and I felt something that not every one can always feel.
Hope.
Here is what I want to tell you about small things.
I have watched empires. I have seen the great bronze doors of power swing open and shut across a thousand years --- Rome, Byzantium, the Caliphates, the Holy Roman Empire, the dynasties of China, the courts of Persia. I have stood in the shadow of monuments built to last forever, and I have watched them crumble. I have seen armies that seemed unstoppable stop. I have seen certainties dissolve like morning frost.
And I have learned, across all of that watching, that the things which actually last are rarely the loudest things.
Menno Simons died in 1561, in a small house near Lübeck, in northern Germany. He had spent twenty-five years on the run. He died in a bed, which was something of a miracle in itself --- most of the people around him hadn't managed that. He left behind a wife, children, and a scattered network of small, peaceful communities stretched across the Netherlands and northern Germany. No cathedral. No army. No endowment. No seat of power.
Just people. Just the idea. Just the long, patient, stubborn insistence that you could build something good without building it on fear.
I stood at the edge of that moment, and I thought: watch this.
Because what happened next is one of my favorite things in all the long centuries I have witnessed.
It grew.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. Not in the way that makes headlines or fills history books with battles and coronations. It grew the way a root grows --- quietly, underground, finding its way around every obstacle, patient beyond what seems reasonable, impossible to stop entirely because you can never quite find where it begins.
The communities Menno had tended spread. When persecution intensified in the Netherlands and Germany, the Mennonites moved --- to Prussia, to Russia, to the Americas. They carried with them the same compact Menno had made with his scattered house churches: we do not use violence. We take care of one another. We live simply. We serve.
And here is where I have to pause, because this is the part that fills me with something I can only describe as a kind of radiant, aching pride.
Those communities planted seeds that grew far beyond themselves.
In the early seventeenth century, a group of English Christians fleeing persecution settled in Amsterdam. They encountered the Mennonites. They watched them. They were changed by what they saw. Some of them became Mennonites. Others carried what they had learned back to England, where they formed the first Baptist congregation in 1612. The Baptists, in turn, became one of the primary tributaries feeding into the great river of religious liberty that eventually shaped the conscience of a new nation across the Atlantic.
The separation of church and state --- the idea that a government has no business telling its citizens what to believe or how to pray --- did not arrive fully formed from nowhere. It was carried forward, thread by thread, through people like Menno, through the communities he built, through the long, costly, unglamorous insistence that conscience cannot be legislated.
I was there for all of it. I watched the threads connect. I saw how one man, hiding in a farmhouse in Friesland, listening for dogs, contributed --- through nothing more than his faithfulness and his pen --- to one of the most important ideas in the history of human civilization.
But I want to tell you about something closer to my heart even than that.
Today, the heirs of Menno Simons run one of the most remarkable humanitarian organizations on earth. The Mennonite Central Committee has been quietly at work since 1920 --- in disaster zones, in refugee camps, in places of famine and conflict and desperate need. They bring food. They build wells. They accompany communities through violence without picking up weapons. They have been in more than sixty countries. They have served millions of people.
They do not do this to convert anyone. They do not do this to expand an empire or win a geopolitical argument. They do it because Menno told a small group of frightened farmers in the sixteenth century that faith without works is empty, and those farmers told their children, and their children told theirs, and somewhere across five centuries that conviction arrived, still alive and still warm, in the hands of people loading aid trucks at three in the morning in places most of the world has already forgotten.
I love them. I want to say that plainly. I love them the way I love everything that was built with patience and kept alive with sacrifice and offered freely to strangers who had no way to repay it.
Menno built no monument. He left no palace. He died in a borrowed house.
And the thing he built is still here.
Still feeding people. Still refusing to pick up the sword. Still choosing, every single day, to build the world it believes in rather than fight the world it opposes.
I told you to watch.
I have been thinking, as I always do at this point in our time together, about you.
Not the world in the abstract. Not humanity as a concept. You, specifically --- the person listening to this right now, wherever you are, whatever is sitting quietly at the back of your mind today.
Because here is what I notice, after all my centuries of watching.
Menno's choice is not as far from your life as it might seem. The distance between sixteenth century Friesland and wherever you are sitting right now is smaller than you think. The names of things have changed. The stakes look different on the surface. But the essential question --- his question --- has not gone anywhere.
Every generation gets some version of it. Two loud, powerful forces, each absolutely certain it is right, each demanding you choose a side, each using fear or anger or spectacle to recruit. And somewhere in the noise, almost too quiet to hear, a third possibility. Not a compromise between the two loud things. Something different in kind. Patient. Community-shaped. Built on service rather than force.
It is still being chosen. Right now. Today. In refugee camps and disaster zones and quiet meeting rooms where people decide together how to help a neighbor they have never met. In every place where someone decides that how you build matters as much as what you build. In every moment where a person looks at the loudest options available and says --- there has to be another way.
I believe there is always another way. I have seen it too many times to doubt it.
So I want to leave you with Menno's question, not his answer --- because his answer was his, and yours will be yours.
Where in your life are you being asked to choose between two things that both feel wrong? And what might it look like --- what small, faithful, unglamorous thing might it look like --- to build instead?
You don't have to listen for dogs. But you might need to be very quiet to hear it.
Next time we sit together, I want to tell you about a man named John Bunyan.
He was an English tinker --- a mender of pots and pans --- who taught himself to preach with such fire and such love that people walked miles through mud and rain just to stand in a field and hear him. And when the authorities decided that a man like that, unlicensed and uncontrollable, was simply too dangerous to leave walking free --- they put him in a jail cell in Bedford and waited for him to go quiet.
He was in that cell for twelve years.
He did not go quiet.
What he wrote in that cell has never been out of print. It has been translated into more languages than any book except the Bible. It has traveled to places Bunyan could never have imagined, in hands he never could have reached. It has been read by slaves seeking freedom, by pilgrims seeking meaning, by children and scholars and people at the end of their rope who needed to be told that the road, however hard, goes somewhere worth going.
The cage became the loom.
I can't wait to tell you that story.
But for now --- sit with Menno a little longer, if you can. Think about the dogs. Think about the farmhouse. Think about what it costs to keep showing up, quietly, faithfully, in a world that would rather you didn't.
And think about the aid trucks, loading in the dark, in places the world has forgotten. Five centuries later. Still at it.
That is what one life, lived with conscience and courage and an absolute refusal to pick up the sword, can set in motion.
I find that almost unbearably beautiful.
I hope you do too.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.