Dropping in on the Shakers
Elie, Paul
A SIGHTSEER AT HOME DROPPING IN ON THE MORE FOR GOD'S EYES THAN FOR OURS ast the turnoff for the Albany county airport is the Shaker settlement, a simple compound-- houses, hall,...
...What but purity is this, to bear witness, up...
...Without question the encyclical was a watershed event in the history of the church...
...I stared at them, they at me...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...What had gone on in this house where celibacy was required of all...
...It denounced the evils of cap- made it plain as noonday that the Roman thought, speech, press, association, assemitalism, but it denounced socialism in an pontiff would have no truck with mod- bly, and so on...
...After growing to four thousand members by 1845, the Shakers dwindled in num- bers, a story of attrition that is well known...
...shopping in Colonie's malls during my trips home, I'm proud in the end, more for God's eyes than for ours...
...And perhaps the the barn...
...social and political reaction throughout ernment is best which governs least...
...Near the largest building, I put my feet down...
...Even so, from a 1989 National Geographic article sent to me by my younger sister I learned as if for the first time the ambiguous facts of Mother Ann's estate...
...It indicated the first stages of a willingness to come to terms A SYLLABUS FOR PROGRESS with the modern world, a process that cul- minated seven decades later with Vatican LEO )(Ill PLAYS CATCH-UP II...
...another is a housing devel- opment...
...The settlement seemed deserted, though, like a tiny college in summer--so I straddled the bike and began to tour the place privately, suddenly a sightseer in my own home- town...
...She came from England to America in 1774, believing that she was the female Messiah, as Jesus was the male one...
...Why had I never been shown this spot, not merely old modate progress: though they renounced the world, Shakers and thus historic, but the place where a religion had come to acquired telephones and automobiles soon after these had been life...
...Shaker the bike, vexed by the laws that discourage talk of religion in asceticism, admired by Thomas Merton a generation ago ("The public schools: surely students at Mencken Grammar and Norman peculiar grace of a Shaker chair," he wrote, "is due to the fact Rockwell High are taught their namesakes' histories...
...A SIGHTSEER AT HOME DROPPING IN ON THE MORE FOR GOD'S EYES THAN FOR OURS ast the turnoff for the Albany county airport is the Shaker settlement, a simple compound-houses, hall, workshop, barn...
...And the two Shaker communities that are still active have feuded for a quarter century now...
...Long and low, of brown brick, with wood siding painted the color of butterscotch, the building once had been the Shakers' meeting house...
...mark encyclical letter, dards the encyclical was a bombshell...
...to know that while I wouldn't renounce the world, someone PAUL ELII~ back there once did...
...Opposite it was a more conventional house--also brick-and- butterscotch, with a two-story screened porch--that signs iden- tified as an office of the nearby county nursing home...
...The Shakers believed that God has both male and female natures, considered men and women equal, and sought to embody a theology of immanence in their useful, innovative objects, among them the clothespin, the flat broom, and per3 May 1991:279 manent-press fabric...
...I know more now...
...Even Leo, when he was not being to flourish about a hundred years ago (about woman is by nature fitted for homework, relatively progressive on the labor question, the time of Rerum novarum), faulted its and it is that which is best adapted at once kept himself busy writing other encyclicals predecessor for excessive individualism, to preserve her modesty and to promote denouncing such evils as freemasonry and for a failure to understand the quasi-organic the good bringing-up of children and the the separation of church and state...
...I wheeled toward the barn, amazed at my naivetr...
...Now it bore signs for the Shaker Heritage Society and the Museum Shop...
...Back in New York, reading up on the subject in Columbia's library, I learned that Mother Ann Lee (1736- 84) was the foundress of the Shaking Quakers, a sect named for the way its adherents would pray themselves into "a mighty trembling, under which they would express the indignation of God against all sin...
...By late twentieth-century Catholic church had been a bulwark of was expressed in the slogan, "That govstandards, Rerum novarum is tame stuff...
...reform, at least signaled an end to the long era of dark reaction...
...Behind the meeting house, to my surprise, was a parking lot, the yellow lines freshly painted, two of the spots marked with a stylized wheelchair motif...
...With eight others she settled in Colonie, establishing what came to be called the Watervliet Society of the United Society of Believers in Christ's First and Second Appearing...
...Then, confidently alone, I admired the house's peaked roof, its clapboard siding, its high upper windows, which I imagined were those of the old bedrooms...
...Was it just a simple nine- teenth-century house, one of many in the area, or did it embody the graceful, ascetical, profound simplicity that the Shakers are admired for...
...For that matter, by late nineteenth-century most of the century...
...What did they expect...
...In the decade So Rerum novarum, if it did not place appreciate the radically social nature of of the 1890s, when socialist labor unions the Catholic church at the forefront of social individual conduct and individual person280: Commonweal...
...A friend told me that Emerson described Shaker miracles as "gleams of a better light--occasional examples of the actions of man upon nature with his entire force...
...Down the road were places I remembered from my childhood---Ann Lee Pond, where I'd skated, Ann Lee Home, where I'd caroled, Heritage Park, where I'd watched minor-league baseball: but I had never visited the spot "here in the valley of the wilderness," as a roadside sign put it, where Ann Lee and company founded America's first Shaker settlement...
...Though I insisted otherwise, an old school friend told me that we'd been taught about the Shakers when we learned New York history...
...It is replete ernism in general and liberalism in par- 2. Progressive liberalism, which began with quaint touches...
...They might have been Shakers' rapid decline in numbers one hundred and fifty years two in a long line of Shaker goats--the sect's only descendants, ago will provide an analogy, inexact but telling nonetheless, as I supposed...
...encyclical recognized the fight of labor Rerum novarum, Pope Pius IX, the imme- The idea was that government should allow unions to exist, but balanced this with an diate predecessor of Leo XIII, issued his maximum liberty in all spheres of activity: emphatic endorsement of the rights of pri- notorious "Syllabus of Errors," which freedom of trade, manufacture, religion, vate property...
...As recently as 1864, (Thomas Carlyle, no friend of this ideal, standards it was pretty tame stuff too...
...even more unqualified way...
...Paul Elie is a student in the Graduate Writing Division at That afternoon, though, I felt ignorant, profoundly so...
...The old Shaker village wasn't one of them...
...eralism, progressive liberalism, and conPope Leo XIII's land- But by nineteenth-century Catholic stan- temporary liberalism...
...The Columbia University...
...Two former Shaker settlements are used as state prisons...
...I hesitated a moment, half afraid that some blast social servant would discover me and embarrass away my sense of wonder...
...The 1. The essence of classical liberalism Rerum novarum...
...And in 1837, "miracles of enthusiasm" at the Watervliet settlement--visions, ecstasies, spoken com- mands from God--announced a "new era" for the Shakers, known as Mother Ann's Second Appearing...
...I coasted vaguely p toward it, then turned off, the tires of my father's bike springy on the gravel...
...While the Canterbury (N.H...
...As I eat at a homemade work table and take books like mine...
...Last year the upscale New York weekly 7 Days pictured a Shaker chair on its cover, to illustrate an article about "essentialism," a new interior-decorating trend...
...nature of society, and for being unable to well-being of the family...
...As the vibrant Shaker communities become more remote in time, interest in Shaker furniture and crafts continues to grow...
...I recalled the Shakers' demise, in the manner of Catholics reflect with growing concern on the church's rule of one culturally literate, as a sort of highbrow Helen Keller joke: clerical celibacy...
...invented, like the hippie throwbacks who spread the message Then, as I stood reflecting, a couple of goats ambled out of of simple living on Macintosh-user networks...
...the Watervliet settlement was sold in 1938...
...I had gone to Shaker High School, worn the sect's name on my gym shorts, but all I knew of the Shakers were a few isolated bits of cultural literacy: that they made sturdy stuff and forbade conjugal love...
...community "closed the covenant" in the 1960s, the Sabbathday Lake (Maine) community has continued to initiate new members---five in all...
...Knowing all this, I feel a vague sense of kinship with the Maybe, I thought, they expected private moments of discovery Shakers...
...It seems possible that Shaker theology will undergo a similar renascence, since in many ways it anticipated current movements in liberal religion...
...to know about the people who built more graceful versions of What but asceticism is this, to forgo descendants who will keep these at the settlement only a mile or so from where I later grew you in the curriculum...
...This has prompted the New Hampshire community to deride the Maine one as "the least of Mother Ann's children in the East" and at one point to withhold funds from the Shaker treasury, which is thought to have swelled to at least $5 million from the sale of Shaker property and handicrafts...
...for instance this: "A ticular...
...Their small, close-knit communities call barn was before me, faded like driftwood...
...And when I revisited the Watervliet settlement before Christmas, the museum shop was crowded with people who had come to buy Shakerish gifts at a crafts fair in the adjacent meeting hall...
...Cantering around to the meeting house's long east wall, I squinted through a high window at the meeting room: here, I supposed, Shakers had worshipped, fashioned quilts, eaten some sort of mealy mush from wooden bowls...
...Back from Manhattan for the weekend, I was out to refresh my senses in familiar sites...
...I dismounted from to mind the Latin American communidades de base...
...For like their furniture and their dwellings, my basic from pine shelves fashioned in a friend's basement, I'm proud unawareness of the Shakers seemed to be a product of their spirit...
...The little more than twenty-five years before described it as "anarchy plus a constable...
...Tours by Appointment," said a placard on the door...
...No sex allowed--of course they died out...
...Time art critic Robert Hughes has written the introduction to a hundred-dollar volume that reproduces Shaker quilts...
...In considering the relationship between ay 15, 1991, is the one and political parties were on the march in the church and liberalism, we may divide hundredth anniversary Germany, France, and Britain, Rerum liberalism into three periods: classical libof the publication of novarum was not exactly radical doctrine...
...This was a Saturday in my hometown, Colonie, New York, a suburb of Albany...
...On the service road now, I slowed down where the pavement rippled, wondering if even the most visionary Shaker prophetess could have foreseen speed bumps...
...Why did that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel I know so little about the miracles of enthusiasm in my home- might come and sit on it"), was surprisingly willing to accom- town...
...Though she died in 1784, the Shakers flourished, founding twen- ty-one other communities in twelve states during this country's Second Great Awakening...
...Most of the Shaker communities closed around the turn of the century...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 9
