On Christmas day, make perfect reconciliation … leave all grudges, hard feelings, and disaffection behind

There are some people and groups throughout history who were so taken with the birth of Jesus — the Christmas story and all it implies — that they hoped Jesus, after he died, would come a second time.

In anticipation they live(d) lives devoted to what they believed are the good tidings of Christmas — the gospel Jesus preached and lived.

One of those groups is the religious community of Shakers who in the late-18th Century settled tracts of land near the roads we drive to and from the Albany International Airport.

They were an offshoot of the Quakers, the peaceful ones, and because of their energetic dancing during religious services, came to be known as the “Shaking Quakers,” which I’ve always taken to be a kind of put-down.

The real name of these shaking people, if you will, is the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. You can see right in their name that they were waiting for Jesus to come again — they wanted another Christmas.

A lot of people today have a hard time understanding such a thing because they have no conception of Christmas or, if they do, it has no “religious” dimension.

A survey by the Pew Research Center a year ago this month asked Americans what Christmas meant to them. The vast majority said they celebrate Christmas, and usually by going to church and visiting with their family — nine out of 10.

But the data also reveal that a goodly number of the youngest among us — in particular the Millennials — say Christmas is a cultural thing, not religious. A cynic might say they caved to the market.

These youngsters say the historical facts surrounding Jesus’s birth, as found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke — the Christmas narrative — have little meaning for them. Was there a manger? Maybe. Was Mary a virgin when Jesus was born? Who knows?

Shepherds, wise men? Nice touch but not applicable. More important is what will I get my Secret Santa.

While Pew’s data are interesting, none of the survey offers answers to questions having to do with whether Christmas changed people’s lives. Because the questions were not asked.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful to know how such a change occurs? Would an outside observer be able to see it?

As we know, the proof of the value of any ethical system is found in whether people follow its mandates. In the case of Christmas, is it possible to celebrate Christmas without including something about Christmas in it?

The Shakers are worth our attention because they offered the world not only a unique vision of what Christmas means but also a way of life that reflected the mandate of the manger.

They set up communities where the resources of everybody were shared, where every person was treated as everybody else; women are equal to men without exception.

The founder, Ann Lee, was a woman. Not long after came Lucy Wright who led the “church” for 25 years. In terms of equality she reminded her family, “There is a daily duty to do; that is, for the Brethren to be kind to the Brethren, Sisters kind to the Sisters, and the Brethren and Sisters kind to each other.”

Because of such values the Shakers seemed distinction-blind. They took in black people, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, ministers as well as penitents. The only prevailing variable was need.

Before the Civil War their numbers grew to 6,000 living in more than 20 communities stretching from New York to Indiana down to Kentucky. Unable to fight in the war because of their pacifism — they were exempted by the president himself — they took in wounded from both sides, they fed and clothed slaves, they gave beds to slaveholders.

One of the marvels of the Shakers is that their sense of community found expression in invention. They invented the flat broom, the clothespin, garden seeds sold in paper packets, the circular saw, and much more.

The beauty and simplicity of the cupboards they built and the chairs they sat on reflected Mother Ann’s maxim, “Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.”

The great poet and Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.”

The devotional 1984 documentary “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God” by Ken Burns and Amy Stechler Burns highlights the radical simplicity of Mother Ann’s followers in every frame.

And in “The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers” (Yale University Press, 1992), Stephen Stein documents the ways the communities grappled with the same kinds of issues every family faces.

After the Civil War, changes in economic and social conditions saw fewer people called to live the Shaker life. The closing of their communities, one after the other in the early part of the 20th Century, is the sad vision of a tree losing its last leaves.

Thus, of the 6,000 who once awaited the Second Appearing, two remain: Brother Arnold Hadd, 61, and Sister June Carpenter in her 70s, both of whom embody the Shaker spirit at their Sabbathday Lake community in New Gloucester, Maine.

I’ve heard more than a few cynics rail over the years: Well, if they were that good, what happened? And then they smirk because another communal experiment failed.

Nothing happened to the Shakers. They have given, and continue to give, America a viable model of community, especially Her early-21st-Century version buried in turmoil, alienation, and vindictive aggression.

We might want to amend many of the Shaker ascetic practices but never the hospitality they extended toward each other and those who came to them in need.  

After the fiery devastation that just took California — and the long drought before that — more than 50,000 people are looking for a home, a community to live in, a hook to hang their continuity on.

Can the care offered by an insurance company match the selfless hospitality a Shaker community affords? The model is there for the taking.

Dire climate-change forecasters say that fire, drought, flood, and related hurricane conditions will not cease but aggravate. And the measure of hardship will no longer be whether the rich on New York City’s Upper East Side, and their counterparts everywhere, will be able to score a grape or two from a surviving vineyard.

Section IV of Part II of the “Millennial Laws or Gospel Statutes and Ordinances Adapted to the day of Christ’s Second Appearing,” first prepared by Father Joseph Meacham and Mother Lucy Wright at their New Lebanon community in August 1821, contains an “Order of Christmas.”

It says that “on Christmas day Believers [and here we substitute Americans] should make perfect reconciliation, one with an other; and leave all grudges, hard feelings, and disaffection one towards an other, eternally behind on this day; and to forgive, as we would be forgiven, and nothing which is this day settled, or which has been settled previous to this, may hereafter be brought forward against an other.”

The Order then adds that Christmas Day is a time “to remember the poor of the world, and to carry to the place of deposit ... such garments and goods, as are designed for them.”

Do you think Meacham and Wright presaged the needs of Californians a Christmas 200 years later? Amid a discouraging moment or two I’m inclined to think the Second Appearing is already upon us.