Sitting with Shakers

August 6: Mother Ann Lee and a handful of Shaker followers arrived in America on this day in 1774. The Shakers (the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) found many applications of Mother Ann’s famous advice to “Put your hands to work and your hearts to God,” one of them in furniture: “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” (Thomas Merton).