The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein

Author:Sarah Krasnostein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2022-02-01T18:33:47+00:00

28

The Kingdom of Heaven

Sunday Service

They are singing hymns in four-part harmony, down in the basement of a building in the Bronx that used to be a synagogue, a place now called The Light of Truth Mennonite Church. Women and young children on the right, men on the left; occasionally one of the fathers will soothe a baby there as well.

The rows face a low platform where an extremely tall blond man stands at a lectern before a red velvet backdrop and under a sign that says: Miranda con esperanza hacia una nueva vision. Look with hope towards a new vision. Under his black blazer he wears a round-collared white shirt. His pleasant face is stretched in an expression of concern as he speaks about God’s command to Moses to remove his sandals when he approached the burning bush for he walked on holy ground. His theme this morning is the importance of knowing whose house we are in. Obedience. Respect.

This is a missionary church and I was invited to attend today. So it is easy enough for me to walk in, however I do feel the consideration of every pair of eyes upon me. Not that many pairs, though, the congregation being relatively small. Its members appear as if they could belong to the same family and they are mostly from Myerstown, Pennsylvania, not the Bronx.

Mennonites are named after Menno Simons, a Dutch Catholic priest who aligned himself with the Anabaptists in the 1530s. Unlike Catholics, who baptize babies, Anabaptists believe that the decision to be baptized can only be made consciously. Persecuted for their differences, Mennonites began arriving in America in the late 1600s and the majority settled in Pennsylvania. There has been a certain amount of theological ferment since then and these days it is easy to get lost in what they laughingly call “the Mennonite maze”—the many differences between churches and between the conferences under which groups of churches are united. But to simplify: Old Order Mennonites physically resemble, but are not, Amish. (The Amish are in fact an eighteenth-century breakaway sect.) Liberal Mennonites look like anyone else walking down the street. The Conservative Mennonites at The Light of Truth are not in-between; they are closer to Old Order Mennonites, and even to the Amish, in significant ways.

Though they drive cars and, generally, use cell phones and filtered internet, Conservative Mennonites separate themselves from mainstream society in many areas of their lives, the most visible being their preference for “plain dress” that to outsiders resembles that worn by the Amish. As a general rule: no TV, no movies, no radio, no secular music. They operate their own schools or rely on homeschooling. They believe in a binary reality. First, there is the earthly kingdom where “a heathen culture” predominates and in which they have little interest and minimal involvement. (For example, they do not vote or take disputes “to law.”) Then there is the kingdom of Heaven, where they hope to eventually go and which is ruled by “a holy, just God who you’re going to have to answer to some day for your actions.

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