Visitors to Sabbathday Lake in Maine, the last Shaker community, discover some astounding facts about the seven women and two men who have inherited the mantle of a celibate religious community founded in the 18th Century.
The Shakers wear jeans. The Shakers watch TV and are partial to
”Mystery!” on PBS. The Shakers drive to town to do their grocery shopping and go to the bank. The Shakers have a Cuisinart, a camcorder and three computers.
”They expect to see the hat or bonnet, the long dress, the high boots,” said Brother Arnold Hadd, 35, who joined the community 14 years ago. ”They`re always so disappointed that we look so normal.”
Three members of the Sabbathday Lake community visited Chicago recently in connection with an exhibit of Shaker furniture at Harvey`s Antiques in Evanston.
The Shakers travel regularly to museums and art galleries throughout the country. They use such occasions to tell the world that Shakers still exist, and that they welcome serious inquiries from people who would like to join them.
”For years now, we`ve been reading that there aren`t any Shakers left,” said Sister Frances Carr, leader of the Sabbathday Lake community. ”But I feel encouraged. There`s been a lot of interest lately.”
The Shaker way of life depends on new converts for survival, and that survival has been precarious for years.
The Shakers, so called because of the ecstatic way they moved while they sang and prayed, came to the U.S. in 1774 with their founder, Ann Lee, a working-class woman from Manchester, England.
The nine original Shakers set out to establish religious communities where men and women would live chastely and emulate Jesus` purity, humility and charity. Mother Ann also preached the revolutionary notion of equality between men and women.
The Shakers grew by taking in converts and orphans. By 1830, about 6,000 Shakers lived in communities throughout New England and as far west as Kentucky and Ohio.
But then the older Shakers began to die. Orphans raised by the Shakers often left the communities when they came of age. And communal religious life did not seem so attractive to 20th Century Americans.
Today, Sabbathday Lake is the only remaining Shaker community, though a 95-year-old Shaker woman still lives in Canterbury, N.H.
The Sabbathday Lake Shakers find themselves battling a widely held notion that they, too, have died out.
Although the oldest member of the community is a 90-year-old woman who joined the Shakers when she was 8, the Shakers are winning new converts-most recently last year. The youngest member is 28.
Communal challenge
In fact, said Hadd, the community has received about 50 letters and telephone calls over the last year from people interested in becoming Shakers. The Shakers winnow the letters carefully to weed out the mentally unstable. ”Religious communities attract them like magnets,” Hadd said ruefully.
And they require that a newcomer live with the community for about a year before making a decision. They want to be certain people really want to become Shakers-and certain the novices will fit in.
Living communally, Hadd said, is a much greater challenge than celibacy.
”In community, we don`t have `I.` We have `we,` ” he said. ”We do not say, `I want to go to the movies.` You have to ask, `Can I go to the movies, and would anyone like to go with me?”`
Celibacy is an important part of the Shaker way of life, Carr said, because spousal or parental attachments would detract from the egalitarian nature of the community.
Moreover, she said, celibacy can be freeing. ”I feel I have many friends that I am able to really love in a non-sexual way,” she said.
Pure survival
Shaker life ”has survived in a more pure form because of celibacy,”
Hadd said. No one is a Shaker because he was born so; each Shaker has made an adult choice.
”We look at other religious communities, like the Amana Colony, that did not practice celibacy,” Carr said. ”They did not survive.”
Sister Meg Haskell, 32, who joined the Shakers eight years ago, once wanted to have children, but said her desire to join the Shakers supplanted that wish.
The thought of having children ”crops up now and again, but it`s not something you harp on,” she says. ”You`ve dedicated your life to something else.”
Convert from curiosity
The decision to become a Shaker is often a gradual evolution that begins with mere curiosity.
Haskell was a high school senior living across the town of New Gloucester, Maine, from Sabbathday Lake when she was assigned to do a school research project.
”I believe it was my mother who suggested I write to the Shaker community and ask if I could do my work there,” Haskell recalled.
”I lived with the community for three weeks. I was put in the garden and the herb department, and I became very attached to it.”
She began attending Sunday religious services, called Shaker meeting. In 1977, she asked if she could live with the community over the summer, while still working outside as a land surveyor. She never left.
”It was wanting to devote my life to God and God`s work, and to be able to do that with other people who were striving for the same thing,” she said. Three years ago, she gave up her outside job to work full time in the Sabbathday Lake herb department, where herbs are grown, packaged and sold worldwide to help support the community.
Hadd first spent a weekend at Sabbathday Lake when he was 18.
”I didn`t actually come with the intention of being a Shaker,” he said. ”It was more out of a sense of curiosity. I was interested in how the life was being lived today.”
At the end of the weekend, he found himself reluctant to leave. ”It was immediately a sense of being at home, that this was a family, an open and warm family you could be part of,” he said.
For the next three years, he drove up every Sunday from Massachusetts, where he was working as a file clerk in a hospital. In 1977, he spent his summer vacation at Sabbathday Lake. The next year, he decided to stay. He is now the community`s printer and curator of collections.
Carr, an outgoing, matter-of-fact woman who handles the community`s correspondence and dealings with the outside world, was one of the orphans the Shakers took in. She came to live at Sabbathday Lake when she was 10, along with her 8-year-old sister. They were placed in a girls` dormitory.
”It took a lot of getting used to,” she said. ”It was hard to merge into so many people at once.” Most painful, she said, was relinquishing her role as caretaker of her sister and watching the adult Shakers take over.
But by the time she was a teenager, she had settled in. She has fond memories of Shaker adolescence.
”They really did understand young people,” she said. ”The Children`s Order lived by themselves, because the Shakers understood that children need to be noisy. We were given a very large room, the Club Room. We had radios, a record player. We could do what we wanted.
”I never really expected that I would remain and be a Shaker,” she said.
Other young people left. ”I really felt quite sad for the Shakers,” she said. ”At one point, about 8 or 10 young girls left in one year.”
Dedication to children
The Shakers told her firmly that they did not want her to stay out of pity. Then she grew close with one of the sisters, who became her spiritual mentor.
And she was struck by the sect`s dedication to children. ”The Shakers suffered great losses during the Great Depression, but never once during the
`30s, `40s or `50s did they turn away a needy child,” she said. ”That impressed me, the giving of themselves.”
When she turned 21, she decided to join them. Her sister left, and today lives nearby with her family.
Prayer and work
The Shakers` day is spent in prayer and in work. They welcome modern technology, and their forebears invented numerous labor-saving devices themselves, including the automatic washing machine, the dump wagon, the flat broom and the circular saw.
The communal house was built with separate men`s and women`s entrances, to lessen temptation. The Shakers eat their meals together, but with the men and women at separate tables.
They are Shaker tables, and throughout the house is scattered Shaker furniture that would command astronomical prices. (Shakers no longer make furniture; the only pieces available are antiques or reproductions.)
The phenomenon of wealthy people spending fortunes on furniture made by people who took vows of Christian poverty horrifies the Shakers.
”It`s just the opposite of everything Shakerism stands for,” Carr said. The Shakers still heat their rooms with wood stoves. They do not add any wood after 8:30 p.m. By morning, the room can be chilly.
”Brother Wayne has a thermometer; he once read 47 degrees,” Haskell said.
”And one time Sister Frances had a glass of water with ice cubes in it in her room overnight. She got up in the morning and the ice was still there.”
When a person becomes a Shaker, he signs a covenant before two witnesses. Surprisingly, that moment is not the most moving in the process of becoming a Shaker, the community members say.
”The most moving part is the first night you start on that life,” Hadd said, ”when you know you are living there, and not going away.”
