God Among the Shakers: The Search for Stillness and Faith at Sabbathday Lake Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to remove yourself wholly from the bustling, modern world and live in an atmosphere of simplicity and peacefulness? Where your daily activities consist of baking bread, crafting furniture, and singing songs in a place where men and women are true equals? Suzanne Skees found such a place at the Shaker Village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, where for more than two hundred years men and women have cultivated not wealth and riches, but a heaven here on earth. The radical Christian sect arrived in the New World in 1774 when Mother Ann Lee and a straggle of English followers sought refuge from religious persecution. The group, called Shakers for the whirling dances they once performed to invoke the spirit of God, soon established America's most successful utopian community. Although the faith surged in the thousands during the nineteenth century, today the celibate Shakers have dwindled down to one small community of eight men and women in Sabbathday Lake. While studying at Harvard Divinity School, Skees was introduced to them and began a correspondence that continued for many years. Eventually she received permission to visit and to learn the Shaker Way.