`God Among the Shakers’ informative but rhapsodic

GOD AMONG THE SHAKERS: A Search for Stillness and Faith at Sabbathday Lake, by Suzanne Skees, Hyperion Press, 1998, 270 pp., $22.95 hardcover.

Shaker Village at Sabbathday Lake has been in New Gloucester, Maine, since the late 18th century — and in recent decades has been home to the last handful of members of a utopian religious sect that once numbered in the thousands across the country.

The dwindling number of Shakers has only increased more worldly people’s fascination with the sect. This emotional, deeply personal book about time spent with the Sabbathday Lake community is the most recent of many popular writings attempting to describe or interpret Shakerism to outsiders.

Suzanne Skees, a California religion writer with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, wrote “God Among the Shakers” after spending several weeks with Maine’s Shakers. “Something called me to come and see, come and see,” she explains. And although it’s packed with historical facts and anecdotes about the sect, Skees’ book is as much about her own life and spiritual struggle as it is about the eight Shakers she crossed a continent to get to know.

Although her constant presence in the narrative sometimes helps us feel that we’re right there in the Shaker Village barn or house with her, Skees’ thoughts, feelings and reactions are so continually in the forefront that her presence sometimes becomes an intrusion.

Skees tries to put the present-day Sabbathday Lake Shakers into the context of the movement since its mid-18th century founding by Mother Ann Lee. This indomitable but illiterate Englishwoman was driven by a powerful vision of God which, although it had roots in Quakerism and Puritanism, was unique in the tenet that absolute celibacy is the route to salvation. (The Shaker rule of celibacy, not surprisingly, has made it a challenge to keep the sect’s numbers up over time. As one modern-day Shaker says to Skees, the system “forgot to include one important thing. How do you get more people?”)

Mother Ann Lee’s in-your-face personality — and the enthusiasm and determination of converts drawn to her claim that “I feel the blood of Christ running through my soul and body!” — ensured that the public noticed, and commented upon, the Shakers from the moment they arrived in America in 1774.

Reactions to the faith and to the whirling, dancing and bodily contortions during worship that gave the sect its name have never been neutral. Some visitors and observers have been repelled by the strict regimentation of celibate communal life — laws observed in the 19th century even dictated the proper way for hands to be clasped in one’s lap. Charles Dickens termed Shakers “among the enemies of Heaven and Earth.” Others, however, have rhapsodized about the spirituality and orderliness of the “family” life through which Shakerism subordinates individual will to the unity of the group. Skeez definitely falls among the rhapsodizers. “I look at the Shakers and see all we have forgotten at the root of our homeland,” she writes.

Readers hoping for a deeper comprehension of Shaker life may be frustrated at first by the back-and-forth manner in which Skees weaves the movement’s history and theology into the contemporary organization of Sabbathday Lake. Seemingly random interviews with the brothers and sisters living there punctuate chapters exploring different aspects of Shaker history and thought, among them God, witchcraft, celibacy, work and spirits.

The book moves along in vignettes: We get a glimpse of an interior of a Shaker Village building; a snippet of an 18th century newspaper account of Shakerism in its heyday (when the sect numbered 6,000 members in two dozen communities); and some insight into the development of the furniture and other types of handiwork that have made Shakers famous for more than religious innovation. Maybe there’s a brief conversation in the kitchen with Sister Frances, eldress of Sabbathday Lake, or a comment from one of the brothers bottle feeding a lamb in the barn. Then (too often) we’re back in Skees’ private life. And so it goes.

Relax into this alternation between Shaker history and Shaker present, however, and the book takes on a soothing rhythm of its own. The process is similar to the way we get to know a new person: through seemingly unrelated bits of information that gradually fall into place.

Chapter by chapter, we find the farm coming into focus as certain key details are touched upon repeatedly while new material fills in the picture. We begin to feel the reality of Shaker spirituality and spiritualism today in comparison with the more rigid organization and mystical transports of past centuries. In casual conversations over time we begin to understand the motives that have drawn the younger members of the community out of the mainstream of a materialistic life and away from romantic and nuclear family attachments to follow a creed of Protestant monasticism in southern Maine.

Don’t expect Skees’ book to be a page turner. In places, the always leisurely pace slows to a crawl. Her sometimes gushing style and largely uncritical admiration for the sect she has traveled east to learn about are occasionally cloying. But bear with these annoyances, and as the book closes her broad strokes of personal, historical and present-day perspective on the Shakers take on the calming regularity and ultimate effectiveness of a well-made Shaker broom in the hands of a thoughtful sweeper.

Sandra Cooke is a magazine writer and editor living in Winterport.