Restoring Shakertown: The Struggle to Save the Historic Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

II. The Vision of Mother Ann

5 The Vision of Mother Ann 5
CHAPTER II The Vision of Mother Ann O ne afternoon in 1957, as a young minister named Don Graham sat gazing out of the window of a Greyhound bus bound from Lexington to Harrodsburg, he became aware that the driver was beginning to address the passengers. Using a microphone as if he were a tour guide enlightening his flock, the driver declared: “Ladies and gentlemen , we will be going through a little village where the men and women really knew how to get along. You will notice that there will be two doors on these buildings. The men lived on one side and the women lived on the other.” That was the burden of his little speech. If people then or at any other time knew nothing else about the Shakers , they knew that the members of this sect had strange and perhaps even incomprehensible ideas about the relationships that ought to prevail between men and women. These ideas traced directly back to one of the more remarkable women in history, Ann Lee, who was born in 1736 into a blacksmith’s family in the English Midlands. To most people at the time, Ann would have seemed just another working-class girl destined for an obscure existence of fourteen-hours-a-day drudgery. She never spent a single day in school but like thousands of other children of the slums was put out to work in the Manchester cotton mills. In two important respects, however, young Ann Lee differed markedly from most of her working sisters: she had a great deal of determination and drive, and at an early age she developed some very unusual ideas about sex. 6 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN She believed that biblical prophets were sending her spiritual messages telling her that it was sinful for a husband and wife to have sexual relations and that, consequently, though she was only a child, she must not stand idly by at home but must make every effort to argue her mother out of engaging in such impure activities with her father—who seems to have expressed strong and angry disagreement with her point of view. Though Ann’s outlook changed enough as she grew up to allow her to marry one Abraham Stanley (his name had various spellings), in 1762, she appears never to have felt at ease in this situation; then came a series of tragedies. Ann gave birth to four children, three of whom died in infancy; the other child was sickly, too, and lived only a few years. Such, she knew in her heart, was the awful result of her yielding to the depraved side of her nature. But she still had a husband, and he still had conventional ideas about marital relations. What should she do now? As it happened, Ann had access to spiritual guidance from persons who saw the world very much as she saw it. A few years earlier, in 1758, in pursuit of escape from the debased and sinful reality amid which she lived, she had joined a small and earnest sect whose animated worship services had earned it the derisive nickname “Shaking Quakers” (just as the members of a later sect would become “Holy Rollers”), although its handful of members included disaffected Anglicans and dissenters, or Methodists, as well as Quakers. The head of the sect suggested a simple solution to Ann’s problem: she should practice sexual abstinence. Ann accepted this counsel, but, accustomed to acting energetically in all situations, she found herself unable even to abstain from something in a passive manner. Instead, she engaged in days of great agonizing and lamentation on the state of the world until she emerged, as it would have been put two centuries later, “born again.” Then came the transcendent experience, her life’s moment of crystallization. In 1770, after being thrown into prison for disrupting an Anglican church service, she experienced not only a vision but a high-level revelation: She herself was nothing less than the fulfillment of the second coming of Christ; Jesus had appeared to her and told her so. His great promise to the world, made more than seventeen hundred years earlier, had now been fulfilled. When Ann emerged from jail and told her fellow Shaking Quakers 7 The Vision of Mother Ann about her revelation and her consequent decision to redeem mankind from the consequences of sin...