Chores, The Shakers, & Jane Kenyon

The Clothes Pin

How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!


--Jane Kenyon, from Room to Room, 1978

The Shakers were a seemingly eccentric bunch. They never had sex. Never. Yet their little social experiment lasted, is still lasting so far as I know, since the mid 1700’s. Never being able to produce much progeny the sect slowly dwindled, but managed to grow quite impressively based entirely on converts about a century after its founding. They were certainly a religious group, or sect, or movement, and had some wobbly theological ideas, but they were enviable in their devotion to the living out of their creed. And to focus on their celibacy, the most shocking of their tenants to modern ears, is to miss the point.

The Shakers were possibly the only collectivist movement that has ever been able to claim itself a success. They lived in small towns they called Societies, and lived entirely communally. These Societies were carefully ordered and regulated, run by trusted elder members, and highly productive more or less self-sufficient towns. They were conscientiously fair minded to both genders, punctiliously tidy, and loathed ornament or any expression of inauthenticity. As a result, their products are simple, beautiful, and highly prized today.

This careful work stemmed from two dearly held maxims of their founder, Mother Ann: "Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow," and "put your hands to work, and your heart to God." The task at hand, whatever it may be, deserved the Shakers entire attention. All work was being done for the glory of God, so all work must ever strive to be perfect.

Perhaps this was the holding principle of the Shakers, the lynch pin that let them live their collective lives successfully. Wholly devoted to their work, they found themselves made whole in their work. With every menial task elevated to the status of the sacred, the drudgery of chores became the freedom of the gospel. Love, indeed, was in every kneaded loaf, every lathed pole, every packet of seeds. The Shakers cared. And they did not care in the sorry sense of a politician who cares about wolves, or jobs, or health care. They cared for their lives as a good gardener cares for her beds. They cared with the moments we usually consider only the margins, the things we have to do while waiting for our real lives to come around on vacations, or parties, or any time other than here, and now.

Mrs. Kenyon shares this sympathy, it seems. Who can question that it is indeed better to do what life requires than to gripe? And not only that but to undertake it simply, straightforwardly, carefully. Not to throw away the used up, but to recognize its worth and place in the world, as compost. Not to whine of cold, but to bring wood for the hearth, cheerily warming yourself and your companions. To make use of the straight forwardness, even the beauty, of line dried wash, held up by a Shaker invention, the clothespin.

Even in this lauding of work, there is no call to labor more than necessary; the Shakers were inventors as well. The clothespin, washing machine, the flat broom, the circular saw all sprung from efficiency tuned Shaker minds. But they are simple inventions, not roaring, violent spewers of sparks. Just as these doers of chores transformed daily tasks into hymns not with bombast or a 60 hour work week, but with humble joy and moderation. Our vocations, of which certainly the chores of life are a part, can be our lives, and not what stands between us and our lives.

So at least we can learn this from these two American voices: to be attentive, plain and strong. And to see in even our humble tasks the shimmer of the everlasting. Do what you love, and if you cannot, then love what you do. For in then end, it is the same thing.