A Tale of the Kloster: A Romance of the German Mystics of the Cocalico

In 18th-century Pennsylvania, where wilderness meets faith, a reformed minister named Johann Peter Müller answers a call he barely understands. The German mystics of Ephrata have built something radical: a semi-monastic community on the Cocalico Creek where souls seek direct communion with the divine, far from the prejudices of the wider world. Müller arrives carrying his doubts like luggage, yet finds himself drawn into the rhythms of solitude, prayer, and strange illumination. What he never expects is a child: Sonnlein, abandoned in the forest, rescued and named for the small sun Müller becomes convinced the boy represents. This is a novel about the weight of choosing devotion, the way community can both constrain and save us, and the stubborn persistence of love in places designed for transcendation. Brother Jabez writes with quiet reverence about people who bet everything on the invisible.