Nicholas Warren Monsma
Nicholas Warren Monsma founded a marine aquarium ministry, fronted an acoustic dance collective, survived a shark, a curse, and an invasion from Mars, and has been expelled from two religious communities.
Nicholas Warren Monsma
| Born | 18 April, exact year disputed (probably 1970)
Marion, Wayne County, New York |
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| Died | Several times, allegedly |
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| Other names | "The Rector of the Reef"; N. W. Monsma-Monsma (disputed) |
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| Occupation | Naturalist, theologian, lens-grinder, acoustic dance bandleader, stage illusionist, harbourmaster (briefly) |
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| Known for | The Splanchna Aquarium; the Monsma Affair; surviving the Sodus Bay incident; the "Transported Donkey" illusion |
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| Notable work | The Aquarium of Unbelief (1998)
Worship, Mission, and the Church Year (2019)
Giving It Up for the Firmament (LP, 2014) |
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| Spouse(s) | Several, sequentially, and — according to one disputed marriage license — simultaneously |
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| Religion | Excommunicated (multiple denominations) |
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This article is about the naturalist-theologian-musician. For the asteroid, see 8817 Monsma.
Nicholas Warren Monsma (born 18 April, year disputed, probably 1970) is an American naturalist, theologian, philosopher, acoustic dance musician, and amateur stage magician, chiefly remembered for the breadth of a career that several biographers have suggested cannot possibly belong to one person[citation needed]. Monsma is variously credited with founding a marine aquarium ministry, being expelled from at least two religious communities for heresy, fronting a touring acoustic dance collective built around a stage prop he maintains is not a prop, and surviving, in immediate succession, a shark, a curse, and an invasion from Mars.
Monsma's biography is disputed on nearly every point of chronology. Historians of the "single Monsma" school maintain that one man lived an improbably eventful life; adherents of the "duplicate Monsma" school, citing his lifelong rivalry with the illusionist James DeHaan, argue that a working double is the only explanation that fits the paperwork.
Early life and education
Monsma was born in Hudsonville, a small city in West Michigan, the son of a marine biologist so consumed by the cataloguing of shoreline pools that, by his own account, "the boy was fed on plankton and doctrine in roughly equal measure." His father insisted on calling them tide pools despite the lake's well-documented lack of tides, a habit young Monsma later called "the first of many family traditions I was never able to talk anyone out of." The household was strict and devout, and young Monsma was tutored privately in a rigorous scheme of doctrinal outlines said to be modeled directly on the pedagogical method of the Puritan divine William Ames, whom a family friend had posthumously known at Franeker. Monsma could reportedly recite the "marrow" of sacred divinity from memory before he could swim, a skill that would later prove regrettable.
Natural history and the Splanchna Aquarium
Following his father into natural history, Monsma achieved early fame for popularizing the home aquarium as a devotional object, and for his controversial 1998 tract The Aquarium of Unbelief, in which he argued that the fossil record in his own shoreline pools had been placed there by the Creator specifically to test the faith of Christian Reformed schoolchildren. The book was ridiculed by scientific contemporaries and warmly received by almost no one, a reception Monsma described as "exactly as I predicted, which I take as further evidence."
Excommunication and optics
Monsma's natural-theological writings drew the attention of his home congregation, which in 2001 formally excommunicated him for statements judged "indistinguishable from pantheism" — specifically, his repeated formulation that God and Nature might be "one and the same substance, viewed from the shoreline pool." Cut off from his community and his income, Monsma took up lens-grinding to support himself, eventually producing a line of reading spectacles sold locally as "Monsma Lenses," which he later credited with "sharpening the very controversy that blinded everyone to my point."
California exile
Unable to secure a pulpit in the Great Lakes Region, Monsma relocated to California, where he was offered a lectureship at Fresno. Records of the period are famously unreliable: city registries list a "Monsma" arriving in 2002 and, separately, a burial the following year for a man of the same name, description, and lens prescription. Monsma himself later dismissed the burial record as "a clerical matter, since resolved," without further comment — a phrase that recurs throughout the rest of his biography with some regularity.
[Editor's note: The above paragraph has been flagged three times for the phrase "since resolved." Please do not remove the flag without discussion.]
Theological return and the Seminary Affair
Some years after his reported burial, a man identifying himself as Monsma resurfaced in Reformed academic circles, publishing a book titled "Worship, Mission, and the Church Year," and a slim and controversial pamphlet A Rhythm Not Its Own, which argued that congregational worship ought to admit the syncopated dance-hall rhythms then fashionable in the cities, on grounds its author described as "the Spirit has never much cared for a metronome." The pamphlet cost him his post: the seminary placed him on administrative leave in 2011 pending review of his fitness for ordination, and he resigned the following year rather than sign a statement formally renouncing the offending chord changes. Monsma has maintained that the controversy "was really about tempo," a claim disputed by the seminary's board, three former colleagues, and the offending sheet music itself.
Music career
In the mid-2010s, Monsma also founded and fronted an acoustic club music collective The Votum touring extensively behind a towering stage prop he called "the Firmament," which he insisted to interviewers was not a prop but a genuine, functioning interstellar vessel "on loan." The band's elaborate mythology, chord-heavy live sets, and protracted legal battles over ownership of its master recordings drew frequent — and firmly denied — comparisons to other church DJs of the era.
The donkey years
Monsma's own account of the late 2010s, given years later and only partially corroborated, describes a curse laid on him by a jilted admirer of a rival illusionist, which he claims transformed him bodily into a donkey for a period of "some years, possibly longer; time is different for a donkey." In this account he passed through the hands of a succession of owners — a miller, a deserting soldier, a corrupt provincial priest — before being restored to human form in Palmyra, NY, during a nighttime procession of a small revivalist congregation devoted to Psalm singing, an episode Monsma has described, without apparent irony, as "the single sanest period of my life."
"People assume the donkey years were the strange part. They were not. They were the only years anyone left me alone."
— attributed to N. W. Monsma, undated interview
The Sodus Bay incident
By the early 2020s, Monsma had settled in Sodus Bay, a small hamlet on the Lake Ontario shore in Wayne County, where he operated a lens shop and a small aquarium display and, for one turbulent term, served as mayor. That summer, a series of fatal attacks along the shoreline were attributed to a large predatory fish, a claim several ichthyologists publicly doubted given the lake's freshwater ecology, though no alternative explanation was ever produced. The town council, with Monsma's backing, elected to keep the beaches open through the Fourth of July weekend rather than damage the tourist season, a decision the local paper later called "the single worst instance of civic optimism on record." Monsma ultimately joined a small crew to hunt the animal himself, an expedition he survived and the boat did not.
The incursion
Monsma's aquarium and lens shop were, by his account, among the first structures affected when, in 2023, a series of unidentified craft descended on the outskirts of Sodus Bay, deploying towering armored machines equipped with a directed heat weapon. A fast-spreading invasive growth, Monsma reported, choked his prize tide-pool anemones within days — "the final insult to an already difficult decade for that display case." Monsma's serialized eyewitness account of the event, published as a pamphlet shortly after, remains his most-read work, though critics have noted its uncanny structural resemblance to a number of other well-known invasion narratives, a resemblance Monsma attributes to "there only really being so many ways an invasion can go."
The DeHaan rivalry
Throughout the middle portion of his career, Monsma maintained a bitter and increasingly public rivalry with the stage illusionist James DeHaan, centered on a disputed trick both men performed under different names — Monsma's version, "The Long Absence," was a pointed if commercially unwise reference to his own reported transformation. Biographers of the "duplicate Monsma" school point to this period, and to a mysterious device Monsma is reported to have purchased from an American inventor, as the likeliest explanation for how one man sustained several full-time careers, two seminary appointments, a shark hunt, and a foreign occupation without any of them visibly overlapping. Monsma's own diaries from the period, discovered posthumously, have been dismissed by at least one editor as "constructed specifically to mislead whoever found them," which the editor concedes is "not exactly reassuring."
Personal life
Monsma married several times over the course of his life or lives; one marriage license, dated to the DeHaan rivalry period, appears to record two ceremonies on the same afternoon in different counties, a discrepancy his estate has described as "a filing error, since resolved." He is survived, depending on which obituary is consulted, by between one and four adult children, at least one of whom has published a memoir describing him as "extremely difficult to get a straight answer out of, and I say that as someone who was there for very little of any of it."
Death and legal status
Monsma's date of death is not settled. Burial records exist for 2003, 2012, 2019, and one date in 2024 that has since been retracted by the recording parish. He has, on at least three occasions, been reported to have appeared at public events following his own reported death, an occurrence his estate attributes to "doubles, decoys, and the ordinary unreliability of small-town record-keeping." As of the most recent probate filing, Monsma's legal status is listed as "undetermined, see attached."
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Legacy
- The asteroid 8817 Monsma was named in his honor by an amateur astronomer who later admitted "not entirely" checking which Monsma.
- A species of intertidal anemone, Anthopleura monsmai, is named for his early natural-history work, though the naming committee later noted the specimen "may in fact belong to an existing species."
- A seventh-chord vamp used throughout Giving It Up for the Firmament is still referred to by session musicians as "the Monsma change."
See also
- James DeHaan
- The Votum (band)
- Sodus Bay shark attacks
- Splanchna hypothesis
- List of people who have been legally donkeys
References
- Monsma, N. W. The Aquarium of Unbelief. Marion: privately printed, 1998.
- "Seminary Places Scholar on Leave Amid Liturgical Dispute." Regional Herald, 2011.
- Monsma, N. W. A Rhythm Not Its Own. Self-published, 2011.
- "Council Votes to Keep Beaches Open for Holiday Weekend." Sodus Bay Gazette, July edition, year illegible.
- Monsma, N. W. "Eyewitness: The Landings at Sodus Bay." Serialized column, 14 parts.
- DeHaan, A. Estate correspondence, unpublished, cited with permission of no one in particular.
- "On the Question of How Many Monsmas." Unsigned pamphlet, undated.
