Shake it up...

America has long offered freedom from religious persecution - the Amish being one example. One other is the Shakers, founded in England in 1770 by Ann Lee. An offshoot of the Quakers, they were said to "shake" because they danced and spoke in tongues.

Their prayer meetings looked like a good old knees up.

Lee had lost four young children which she saw as a punishment from God. Following the death of her fourth child she claimed to have had a vision from God in which it was explained to her that sexual intercourse was the root of all sin, and that to truly serve God, one must be celibate.

Ann Lee

In 1772, Ann received another vision from God, in the form of a tree, in which it was communicated to her that "a place had been prepared" for the Shakers in America. So nine Shakers emigrated to America in 1774, and built the first of eighteen Shaker communities in America.

Their buildings have an elegant practical simplicity.

Shakers live by four basic tenets; they live communally, they were celibate, they regularly confess their sins and they separated themselves from the outside world. The communities were revolutionary because they offered both spiritual and physical equality - men and women were fundamentally equal and treated as such. This equality also extended to non-Christians and individuals of different races who joined the communities.

Each member of the community had an obligation to work, which resulted in a surplus of products that the Shakers made for sale. This meant they were a prosperous community. Their beautiful crafts, buildings and grounds have therefore always reflected both the pride and care that they took in their work, and the simplicity and utility that their lives demanded.

Typical Shaker furniture - cleverly made to hang out of the way.

 We visited what was once a Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire and liked what we discovered.

The Meeting Hall. Gentlemen entered the door on the left, ladies on the right.

They had no personal possessions but they were practical - inventing metal pen nibs, the flat broom, a prototype washing machine called a wash mill, the circular saw (invented by a woman, Tabitha Babbit), waterproof and wrinkle-free cloth, a metal chimney cap that blocked rain and they improved on the plough.

No photographs allowed inside the buildings - so the wood store must suffice to show how practical they were...

As pacifists the Shakers did not believe in harming others, even at time of war. As a result, in the Civil War both Union and Confederate soldiers found their way to the Shaker communities. Shakers tended to sympathize with the Union but they did feed and care for soldiers on both sides. President Lincoln exempted Shakers from military service, and they became some of the first conscientious objectors in American history.

With one of their tenets being celibacy, to survive as a community they needed new believers to join them - or they adopted children. At the age of 21 however these were given a choice of whether to remain with the Shaker community or go their own way into the world - even receiving money and help to get themselves started if needs be. But perhaps inevitably the numbers have dwindled from over 4000 in 1850  to under a dozen today.

Here they elected to have one gravestone for all the Shakers buried in this graveyard. That's real solidarity!

We liked the Shakers. There was a simplicity and honesty about their lives that had a great attraction for us.

Women did women's work and men did men's, but they were always equal before God.

To quote from the website of the last Shaker community at Sabbathday:

"Shakerism has a message for the this present age - a message as valid today as when it was first expressed. It values human fulfillment highly and believes that we fulfill ourselves best by being nothing more nor less than ourselves. It believes that Christian love is a love beyond disillusionment, for we cannot be disillusioned with people being themselves. Surely God would not have it otherwise for it is in being ourselves - our real selves - that we are most like Christ in his sacred oneness. "