One of the reasons that the furniture and other items made and used by Shakers are attractive to many people is due, I suspect, not only to an “aesthetic” appeal, but to a discernibly spiritual quality in their work. Shaker workmanship is, for me, an act of praise and celebration; the attention paid to the simplicity of lines is an expression of a simplicity of heart and an attitude of prayerful living. The spare lines, beauty, and yet functionality and reliability of the things they made speak to me of a deep understanding of form and function, of the need for the simplest design to produce the desired working, an appreciation for the way the grain of the wood or the warp of the cloth needed to go; and of a kind of reverent mindfulness, an attention to the nature of things, a love of the work, humility, patience, a sense of proportion and sufficiency, and a necessary slowness. Such qualities, it seems to me, come ultimately from a felt sense of the unity and harmony of a life lived in God, in community, and in the world; an inward realization that yields, when fully deepened and seasoned, not only simplicity in workmanship, but a sense of the balance between doing and resting; between sowing and reaping; between plowing and leaving fallow; between moving inward to prayer and outward to work and service; an intimate relationship with the land and its gifts; and a covenant of giving and taking as members one of another in community. As I walked years ago among the houses, barns, and fields of the old, now silent, community at Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, I felt that, at their deepest, Shaker communities, flawed as all utopian communities inevitably are, have much to tell us about communal experiments in living in integrity.
A century later and across the world, Gandhi in India, and later A.T. Ariyaratne in Sri Lanka, began to experiment with the development of village communities, grounded in the principles of integrity, simplicity, and nonviolence, whose aim was to achieve sarvodaya, the welfare and awakening of all. Gandhi envisaged multiple, interconnected yet independent “village republics” – small-scale, self-governed, self-reliant communities – in which essential needs could be met within a local system of mutual interdependence which would radiate outward in ever-widening circles of interconnection. His goal was to foster communities where people were known and beholden to each other; where the dignity and freedom that came from self-reliant labor was given prominence; where the structure of governance was both participatory and distributive; where nonviolence was practiced toward all living beings; and where the wider natural world was understood both as the source of everyone’s well-being and as an integral part of the human community.
What kinds of communities can we create today, in the urban, technological world many of us live in, and how can they be expressions of integrity with the earth?
–Jennie M. Ratcliffe in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 403: Integrity, Ecology, and Community: The Motion of Love